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LEARNING  TO  WRITE 


LEARNING  TO  WRITE 

SUGGESTIONS  AND  COUNSEL  FROM 

ROBERT  LOUIS  STEVENSON 


That,  like  it  or  not,  is  the  way  to  learn  to  write; 
whether  I  have  profited  or  not,  that  is  the  way. 
A  College  Magazine,  in 
"Memories  and  Portraits" 


,»'•>»     e    • 


NEW  YORK 

CHARLES  SCRIBNER'S  SONS 

1920 


COPYRIGHT,  1888,  I920,  BY 

CHARLES  SCRIBNER'S  SONS 


T/YI45 

S?3 


CONTENTS 

PAOI 

I.  How  Stevenson  Taught  Himself  to 
Write  from  "A  College  Maga- 
zine"          i 

n.  Letter  to  a  Young  Gentleman  Who 
Proposes  to  Embrace  the  Ca- 
reer of  Art 7 

ni.    A  Note  on  Realism 21 

IV.    Books  Which  Have  Influenced  Me  32 

V.    A  Gossip  on  Romance 44 

VI.    The  Craft  in  Telling  a  Story,  from 

"A  Humble  Remonstrance" . . .  66 

VII.    Miscellaneous  Observations: 

NOTES  FOR  THE  STUDENT  OF  ANY  ART  78 

craftsmanship  ln  literature 79     y 

importance  of  style  in  writing  .  82  ' 

danger  of  realism 83 

difficulty  for  beginners   83 

writing  without  effort 84 

subjects  for  poems 87     4 

Stevenson's  method  of  writing.  .  87  *" 

holding  the  reader^  attention  .  88  - 

WORDS     88 

EFFECTIVENESS  OF  PROFUSE  DESCRIP-  ^s 

tion 9° 

V 


M66623 


CONTENTS 

PAGE 

USE  OF  RECOLLECTIONS  IN  WRITING  91 
BUILDING  A  CHARACTER  FOR  A  STORY  94 
HOW   WE   UNDERSTAND   OTHER   PEO- 
PLE    95 

WRITING  CHARACTER  STUDD2S 96 

A  TRICK  OF  HEROINES     IOO 

DIFFICULTY  AND  ADVANTAGE  OF  COL- 
LABORATION         IOI 

THE    IMPORTANCE   OF   NARRATIVE   IN 

LITERATURE 102 

SUBJECT  FOR  LITERATURE IO3 

SPIRIT  IN  LITERATURE     IO3 

WHAT    INTERESTS    US    IN    ROBINSON 

CRUSOE IO4 

BOOKS  WE  RE-READ IO4 

WHEN      THE      IMAGINATION      GROWS 

STALE 105 

AN  ANALYSIS  OF  THE  FABLE  FORM.       107 
THE    GENESIS    OF    "THE    MASTER    OF 

BALLANTRAE " IIO 

HOW  THE  ROMANTIC  MOVEMENT 
FREED  THE  IMAGINATION  IN  WRIT- 
ING          115 

VIII.    The  Morality  of  the  Profession 

of  Letters 120 

IX.    Popular  Authors 138 

X.    Some  Gentlemen  in  Fiction  159 

XI.    A  Chapter  on  Dreams 176 

XII.    On  Some  Technical  Elements  of 

Style  in  Literature 197 


INTRODUCTION 

How  Stevenson  would  have  developed  his 
proposed  book,  The  Art  of  Literature,  we  may 
only  guess,  for  the  project  never  found  tangible 
form  further  than  the  " loose  ends"  in  scattered 
essays  and  random  observations  spontaneously 
put  into  his  pages  by  way  of  apt  illustration  or 
to  clinch  the  point  in  a  criticism.  Yet,  in  those 
unjointed  observations,  the  spirit  of  the  book 
was  truly  born  and — as  the  brief  character  of 
Julius  Caesar  dominates  Shakespeare's  play — 
its  personality  pervades  and  colors  all  of  Steven- 
son's works. 

He  himself  points  out  in  his  paper,  "Fon- 
tainebleau,"  that  while  he  was  learning  to  write 
he  spent  much  of  his  time  in  Barbizon  in  the 
company  of  painters.  Surrounded  by  this  at- 
mosphere in  which  art  was  made  by  the  labor 
of  tie  hands,  and  was  obviously  blundered  or 
created  according  to  their  skill  in  the  principles 
of  technic — the  necessity  of  a  technic  in  all  art 
was  made  vividly  clear  to  him. 

"To  find  for  all  he  had  to  say  words  of  vital 
aptness  and  animation — to  communicate  as 
much  as  possible  of  what  he  has  somewhere 
called  'the  incommunicable  thrill  of  things' — 
was  from  the  first  his  endeavor — nay  more,  it 
was  the  main  passion  of  his  life,"  says  his  great 
friend  Sidney  Colvin.    It  is  not  unnatural,  then, 

vii 


viii  INTRODUCTION 

that  he  determined  to  achieve  a  technic  in 
writing  and  that  his  interest  in  the  craft  of 
literature — the  means  of  commanding  expres- 
sion— should  have  moved  him  deeply. 

No  writer  ever  took  more  pains  to  learn  how 
to  write,  and  it  is  significant  that  no  author  in 
modern  times  has  been  so  successful  in  so  many 
forms  of  literature.  It  is  significant,  too,  for  his 
theories  of  craftsmanship  that  he  has  gained  the 
interest  of  an  astonishingly  wide  and  varied 
audience,  and  that  along  with  the  perfection  in 
form  and  style  which  gives  pleasure  chiefly  to 
the  fastidious,  he  appeals  (speaking  from  Col- 
vin  again)  "rather  to  the  universal,  hereditary 
instincts,  to  the  primitive  sources  of  imaginative 
excitement  in  the  race." 

Of  course,  this  tremendous  practical  success 
of  his  books  is  what  has  kept  his  prescribed 
canons  of  learning  how  to  write  before  the 
world — and  to-day  they  have  been  so  much 
heralded  that  people  who  have  not  read  half  a 
dozen  pages  in  his  books  know  something  about 
them.  Yet,  in  spite  of  the  constant  reference  to 
them — in  spite  of  discussion  prolonged  from 
year  to  year — there  has  never  before  been  a 
systematic  attempt  to  gather  together  and  ar- 
range in  one  volume  all  he  has  left  directly  on 
the  art  of  writing; — that  is  what  this  book  has 
tried  to  do.  How  significant  such  a  collection 
will  be  remains  to  be  proved;  at  least,  to  any 
one  seriously  concerned  with  the  business  of 
learning  to  write,  it  will  be  interesting  to  ex- 
amine, and  the  reader  cannot  turn  away  from 
it  except  refreshed  with  the  splendid  saneness. 


INTRODUCTION  ix 

But  he  who  comes  seeking  a  macadamized, 
mile-posted  road  to  the  secret  of  writing,  or  a 
set  of  classroom  rules  to  be  duly  worked  out 
with  an  academic  niceness  will  be  disappointed. 
For  definite  as  is  the  trade  of  writing,  it  is  the 
united  cry  of  all  good  craftsmen  in  the  profes- 
sion of  letters  that  for  each  man  literature  is  an 
uncharted  sea  and  that  the  waves  wash  away 
the  track  of  every  vessel  that  has  gone  before. 
Yet,  here  is  the  log  of  one  such  vessel  which 
made  her  port  with  colors  flying,  and  for  those 
who  have  a  genuine  taste  for  the  sea — an  in- 
stinct for  its  language  and  hardships — there  is 
much  to  be  learned  which  will  help  them  on  their 
adventures. 

In  arranging  the  contents  of  this  book,  it  has 
been  the  plan  to  try  to  group  them  so  the  reader 
may  learn  something  of  Stevenson's  theory  of 
the  craft  of  writing  before  he  is  led  into  a  dis- 
cussion of  the  intricate  technical  details.  In 
some  cases,  for  instance  in  the  passages  from  A 
Humble  Remonstrance,  the  editor  has  omitted 
certain  parts  which  if  included  in  the  present 
scheme  would  uselessly  tend  to  confuse  the 
reader. 

John  William  Rogers,  Jr. 


The  difficulty  of  literature  is  not  to  write,  but  to 
write  what  you  mean;  not  to  affect  your  reader,  but 
to  affect  him  precisely  as  you  wish.  This  is  com- 
monly understood  in  the  case  of  books  or  set  orations; 
even  in  making  your  will,  or  writing  an  explicit  letter, 
some  difficulty  is  admitted  by  the  world.  But  one 
thing  you  can  never  make  Philistine  natures  under- 
stand; one  thing,  which  yet  lies  on  the  surface,  re- 
mains as  unseizable  to  their  wits  as  a  high  flight  of 
metaphysics — namely,  that  the  business  of  life  is 
mainly  carried  on  by  means  of  this  difficult  art  of  litera- 
ture, and  according  to  a  man's  proficiency  in  that  art 
shall  be  the  freedom  and  the  fulness  of  his  intercourse 
with  other  men. 

— The  Truth  of  Intercourse. 


HOW  STEVENSON  TAUGHT  HIMSELF 
TO  WRITE:  ;.,..,   , 

>      > 

From  "A  College  Magazine",  i#*  * 

•    •  •«  t  '  *  ,>  •• 

All  through  my  boyhood  and  youth,  I  was 
known  and  pointed  out  for  the  pattern  of  an 
idler;  and  yet  I  was  always  busy  on  my  own 
private  end,  which  was  to  learn  to  write.  I 
kept  always  two  books  in  my  pocket,  one  to 
read,  one  to  write  in.  As  I  walked,  my  mind 
was  busy  fitting  what  I  saw  with  appropriate 
words;  when  I  sat  by  the  roadside,  I  would 
either  read,  or  a  pencil  and  a  penny  version- 
book  would  be  in  my  hand,  to  note  down  the 
features  of  the  scene  or  commemorate  some 
halting  stanzas.  Thus  I  lived  with  words. 
And  what  I  thus  wrote  was  for  no  ulterior  use, 
it  was  written  consciously  for  practice.  It  was 
not  so  much  that  I  wished  to  be  an  author 
(though  I  wished  that  too)  as  that  I  had  vowed 
that  I  would  learn  to  write.  That  was  a  pro- 
ficiency that  tempted  me;  and  I  practised  to 
acquire  it,  as  men  learn  to  whittle,  in  a  wager 
with   myself.     Description  was   the  principal 


2  LEARNING  TO  WRITE 

field  of  my  exercise;  for  to  any  one  with  senses 
there  is  always  something  worth  describing, 
and  town  and  country  are  but  one  continuous 
subject.  But  I  worked  in  other  ways  also;  often 
accompanied  my  walks  with  dramatic  dia- 
logues, in  which  I  played  many  parts;  and  often 
exercised  myself  in  writing  down  conversations 
Jtm  memoiy.  -. 

This,  was  att  excellent,  no  doubt;  so  were  the 
'diaries'  I  some  time's  tried  to  keep,  but  always 
and  very  speedily  discarded,  finding  them  a 
school  of  posturing  and  melancholy  self-decep- 
tion. And  yet  this  was  not  the  most  efficient 
part  of  my  training.  Good  though  it  was,  it 
only  taught  me  (so  far  as  I  have  learned  them 
at  all)  the  lower  and  less  intellectual  elements 
of  the  art,  the  choice  of  the  essential  note  and 
the  right  word:  things  that  to  a  happier  con- 
stitution had  perhaps  come  by  nature.  And 
regarded  as  training,  it  had  one  grave  defect; 
for  it  set  me  no  standard  of  achievement.  So 
that  there  was  perhaps  more  profit,  as  there 
was  certainly  more  effort,  in  my  secret  labours 
at  home.  Whenever  I  read  a  book  or  a  passage 
that  particularly  pleased  me,  in  which  a  thing 
was  said  or  an  effect  rendered  with  propriety, 
in  which  there  was  either  some  conspicuous 
force  or  some  happy  distinction  in  the  style,  I 
must  sit  down  at  once  and  set  myself  to  ape 


STEVENSON  TAUGHT  HIMSELF   3 

that  quality.  I  was  unsuccessful,  and  I  knew 
it;  and  tried  again,  and  was  again  unsuccessful 
and  always  unsuccessful;  but  at  least  in  these 
vain  bouts,  I  got  some  practice  in  rhythm,  in 
harmony,  in  construction  and  the  co-ordination 
of  parts.  I  have  thus  played  the  sedulous  ape 
to  Hazlitt,  to  Lamb,  to  Wordsworth,  to  Sir 
Thomas  Browne,  to  Defoe,  to  Hawthorne,  to 
Montaigne,  to  Baudelaire  and  to  Obermann. 
I  remember  one  of  these  monkey  tricks,  which 
was  called  The  Vanity  of  Morals:  it  was  to  have 
had  a  second  part,  The  Vanity  of  Knowledge; 
and  as  I  had  neither  morality  nor  scholarship, 
the  names  were  apt;  but  the  second  part  was 
never  attempted,  and  the  first  part  was  written 
(which  is  my  reason  for  recalling  it,  ghostlike, 
from  its  ashes)  no  less  than  three  times:  first  in 
the  manner  of  Hazlitt,  second  in  the  manner  of 
Ruskin,  who  had  cast  on  me  a  passing  spell, 
and  third,  in  a  laborious  pasticcio  of  Sir  Thomas 
Browne.  So  with  my  other  works:  Cain,  an 
epic,  was  (save  the  mark !)  an  imitation  of  Sor- 
dellc:  Robin  Hood,  a  tale  in  verse,  took  an 
eclectic  middle  course  among  the  fields  of  Keats, 
Chaucer  and  Morris:  in  Monmouth,  a  tragedy,  I 
reclined  on  the  bosom  of  Mr.  Swinburne;  in  my 
innumerable  gouty-footed  lyrics,  I  followed 
many  masters;  in  the  first  draft  of  The  King's 
Pardon,   a  tragedy,  I  was  on  the  trail  of  no 


4  LEARNING  TO  WRITE 

lesser  man  than  John  Webster;  in  the  second 
draft  of  the  same  piece,  with  staggering  versa- 
tility, I  had  shifted  my  allegiance  to  Congreve, 
and  of  course  conceived  my  fable  in  a  less  seri- 
ous vein — for  it  was  not  Congreve's  verse,  it 
was  his  exquisite  prose,  that  I  admired  and 
sought  to  copy.  Even  at  the  age  of  thirteen  I 
had  tried  to  do  justice  to  the  inhabitants  of  the 
famous  city  of  Peebles  in  the  style  of  the  Book 
of  Snobs.  So  I  might  go  on  for  ever,  through 
all  my  abortive  novels,  and  down  to  my  later 
plays,  of  which  I  think  more  tenderly,  for  they 
were  not  only  conceived  at  first  under  the  brac- 
ing influence  of  old  Dumas,  but  have  met  with 
resurrections:  one,  strangely  bettered  by  an- 
other hand,  came  on  the  stage  itself  and  was 
played  by  bodily  actors;  the  other,  originally 
known  as  Semiramis:  a  Tragedy,  I  have  ob- 
served on  bookstalls  under  the  alias  of  Prince 
Otto.  But  enough  has  been  said  to  show  by 
what  arts  of  impersonation,  and  in  what  purely 
ventriloquial  efforts  I  first  saw  my  words  on 
paper. 

That,  like  it  or  not,  is  the  way  to  learn  to 
write;  whether  I  have  profited  or  not,  that  is 
the  way.  It  was  so  Keats  learned,  and  there 
was  never  a  finer  temperament  for  literature 
than  Keats's;  it  was  so,  if  we  could  trace  it 
out,  that  all  men  have  learned;  and  that  is  why 


STEVENSON  TAUGHT  HIMSELF      5 

a  revival  of  letters  is  always  accompanied  or 
heralded  by  a  cast  back  to  earlier  and  fresher 
models.  Perhaps  I  hear  some  one  cry  out:  But 
this  is  not  the  way  to  be  original!  It  is  not; 
nor  is  there  any  way  but  to  be  born  so.  Nor 
yet,  if  you  are  born  original,  is  there  anything 
in  this  training  that  shall  clip  the  wings  of  your 
originality.  There  can  be  none  more  original 
than  Montaigne,  neither  could  any  be  more 
unlike  Cicero;  yet  no  craftsman  can  fail  to  see 
how  much  the  one  must  have  tried  in  his  time 
to  imitate  the  other.  Burns  is  the  very  type 
of  a  prime  force  in  letters:  he  was  of  all  men  the 
most  imitative.  Shakespeare  himself,  the  im- 
perial, proceeds  directly  from  a  school.  It  is 
only  from  a  school  that  we  can  expect  to  have 
good  writers ;  it  is  almost  invariably  from  a 
school  that  great  writers,  these  lawless  excep- 
tions, issue.  Nor  is  there  anything  here  that 
should  astonish  the  considerate.  Before  he 
can  tell  what  cadences  he  truly  prefers,  the 
student  should  have  tried  all  that  are  possible; 
before  he  can  choose  and  preserve  a  fitting  key 
of  words,  he  should  long  have  practised  the 
literary  scales;  and  it  is  only  after  years  of  such 
gymnastic  that  he  can  sit  down  at  last,  legions 
of  words  swarming  to  his  call,  dozens  of  turns 
of  phrase  simultaneously  bidding  for  his  choice, 
and  he  himself  knowing  what  he  wants  to  do 


6  LEARNING  TO  WRITE 

and  (within  the  narrow  limit  of  a  man's  abil- 
ity) able  to  do  it. 

And  it  is  the  great  point  of  these  imitations 
that  there  still  shines  beyond  the  student's 
reach  his  inimitable  model.  Let  him  try  as  he 
please,  he  is  still  sure  of  failure;  and  it  is  a  very 
old  and  a  very  true  saying  that  failure  is  the 
only  highroad  to  success.  I  must  have  had 
some  disposition  to  learn;  for  I  clear-sightedly 
condemned  my  own  performances.  I  liked 
doing  them  indeed;  but  when  they  were  done, 
I  could  see  they  were  rubbish.  In  consequence, 
I  very  rarely  showed  them  even  to  my  friends; 
and  such  friends  as  I  chose  to  be  my  con- 
fidants I  must  have  chosen  well,  for  they  had 
the  friendliness  to  be  quite  plain  with  me. 
"Padding,"  said  one.  Another  wrote:  "I  can- 
not understand  why  you  do  lyrics  so  badly." 
No  more  could  I !  Thrice  I  put  myself  in  the 
way  of  a  more  authoritative  rebuff,  by  sending 
a  paper  to  a  magazine.  These  were  returned; 
and  I  was  not  surprised  nor  even  pained.  If 
they  had  not  been  looked  at,  as  (like  all  ama- 
teurs) I  suspected  was  the  case,  there  was  no 
good  in  repeating  the  experiment;  if  they  had 
been  looked  at — well,  then  I  had  not  yet  learned 
to  write,  and  I  must  keep  on  learning  and 
living. 


II 


LETTER  TO  A  YOUNG  GENTLEMAN 

WHO    PROPOSES    TO    EMBRACE 

THE  CAREER  OF  ART 

With  the  agreeable  frankness  of  youth,  you 
address  me  on  a  point  of  some  practical  im- 
portance to  yourself  and  (it  is  even  conceiv- 
able) of  some  gravity  to  the  world:  Should  you 
or  should  you  not  become  an  artist?  It  is  one 
which  you  must  decide  entirely  for  yourself; 
all  that  I  can  do  is  to  bring  under  your  notice 
some  of  the  materials  of  that  decision;  and  I 
will  begin,  as  I  shall  probably  conclude  also,  by 
assuring  you  that  all  depends  on  the  vocation. 

To  know  what  you  like  is  the  beginning  of 
wisdom  and  of  old  age.  Youth  is  wholly  ex- 
perimental. The  essence  and  charm  of  that 
unquiet  and  delightful  epoch  is  ignorance  of 
self  as  well  as  ignorance  of  life.  These  two 
unknowns  the  young  man  brings  together 
again  and  again,  now  in  the  airiest  touch,  now 
with  a  bitter  hug;  now  with  exquisite  pleasure, 
now  with  cutting  pain;  but  never  with  indiffer- 
ence, to  which  he  is  a  total  stranger,  and  never 
7 


8  LEARNING  TO  WRITE 

with  that  near  kinsman  of  indifference,  con- 
tentment. If  he  be  a  youth  of  dainty  senses 
or  a  brain  easily  heated,  the  interest  of  this 
series  of  experiments  grows  upon  him  out  of 
all  proportion  to  the  pleasure  he  receives.  It 
is  not  beauty  that  he  loves,  nor  pleasure  that 
he  seeks,  though  he  may  think  so;  his  design 
and  his  sufficient  reward  is  to  verify  his  own 
existence  and  taste  the  variety  of  human  fate. 
To  him,  before  the  razor-edge  of  curiosity  is 
dulled,  all  that  is  not  actual  living  and  the  hot 
chase  of  experience  wears  a  face  of  a  disgusting 
dryness  difficult  to  recall  in  later  days;  or  if 
there  be  any  exception — and  here  destiny  steps 
in — it  is  in  those  moments  when,  wearied  or 
surfeited  of  the  primary  activity  of  the  senses, 
he  calls  up  before  memory  the  image  of  trans- 
acted pains  and  pleasures.  Thus  it  is  that  such 
an  one  shies  from  all  cut-and-dry  professions, 
and  inclines  insensibly  toward  that  career  of 
art  which  consists  only  in  the  tasting  and  re- 
cording of  experience. 

This,  which  is  not  so  much  a  vocation  for 
art  as  an  impatience  of  all  other  honest  trades, 
frequently  exists  alone;  and  so  existing,  it  will 
pass  gently  away  in  the  course  of  years.  Em- 
phatically, it  is  not  to  be  regarded;  it  is  not  a 
vocation,  but  a  temptation;  and  when  your 
father  the  other  day  so  fiercely  and  (in  my 


TO  A  YOUNG  GENTLEMAN         9 

view)  so  properly  discouraged  your  ambition, 
he  was  recalling  not  improbably  some  similar 
passage  in  his  own  experience.  For  the  temp- 
tation is  perhaps  nearly  as  common  as  the 
vocation  is  rare.  But  again  we  have  vocations 
which  are  imperfect;  we  have  men  whose  minds 
are  bound  up,  not  so  much  in  any  art,  as  in 
the  general  ars  artium  and  common  base  of  all 
creative  work;  who  will  now  dip  into  painting, 
and  now  study  counterpoint,  and  anon  will  be 
inditing  a  sonnet:  all  these  with  equal  interest, 
all  often  with  genuine  knowledge.  And  of  this 
temper,  when  it  stands  alone,  I  find  it  difficult 
to  speak;  but  I  should  counsel  such  an  one  to 
take  to  letters,  for  in  literature  (which  drags 
with  so  wide  a  net)  all  his  information  may  be 
found  some  day  useful,  and  if  he  should  go  on 
as  he  has  begun,  and  turn  at  last  into  the 
critic,  he  will  have  learned  to  use  the  necessary 
tools.  Lastly  we  come  to  those  vocations 
which  are  at  once  decisive  and  precise;  to  the 
men  who  are  born  with  the  love  of  pigments, 
the  passion  of  drawing,  the  gift  of  music,  or 
the  impulse  to  create  with  words,  just  as  other 
and  perhaps  the  same  men  are  born  with  the 
love  of  hunting,  or  the  sea,  or  horses,  or  the 
turning-lathe.  These  are  predestined;  if  a  man 
love  the  labour  of  any  trade,  apart  from  any 
question  of  success  or  fame,  the  gods  have 


io  LEARNING  TO  WRITE 

called  him.  He  may  have  the  general  vocation 
too:  he  may  have  a  taste  for  all  the  arts,  and  I 
think  he  often  has;  but  the  mark  of  his  calling 
is  this  laborious  partiality  for  one,  this  inex- 
tinguishable zest  in  its  technical  successes,  and 
(perhaps  above  all)  a  certain  candour  of  mind, 
to  take  his  very  trifling  enterprise  with  a  grav- 
ity that  would  befit  the  cares  of  empire,  and  to 
think  the  smallest  improvement  worth  accom- 
plishing at  any  expense  of  time  and  industry. 
The  book,  the  statue,  the  sonata,  must  be  gone 
upon  with  the  unreasoning  good  faith  and  the 
unflagging  spirit  of  children  at  their  play.  Is 
it  worth  doing? — when  it  shall  have  occurred 
to  any  artist  to  ask  himself  that  question,  it  is 
implicitly  answered  in  the  negative.  It  does 
not  occur  to  the  child  as  he  plays  at  being  a 
pirate  on  the  dining-room  sofa,  nor  to  the 
hunter  as  he  pursues  his  quarry;  and  the  can- 
dour of  the  one  and  the  ardour  of  the  other 
should  be  united  in  the  bosom  of  the  artist. 

If  you  recognise  in  yourself  some  such  de- 
cisive taste,  there  is  no  room  for  hesitation: 
follow  your  bent.  And  observe  (lest  I  should 
too  much  discourage  you)  that  the  disposition 
does  not  usually  burn  so  brightly  at  the  first, 
or  rather  not  so  constantly.  Habit  and  prac- 
tice sharpen  gifts;  the  necessity  of  toil  grows 
less  disgusting,  grows  even  welcome,  in  the 


TO  A  YOUNG  GENTLEMAN        n 

course  of  years;  a  small  taste  (if  it  be  only 
genuine)  waxes  with  indulgence  into  an  ex- 
clusive passion.  Enough,  just  now,  if  you  can 
look  back  over  a  fair  interval,  and  see  that 
your  chosen  art  has  a  little  more  than  held  its 
own  among  the  thronging  interests  of  youth. 
Time  will  do  the  rest,  if  devotion  help  it;  and 
soon  your  every  thought  will  be  engrossed  in 
that  beloved  occupation. 

But  even  with  devotion,  you  may  remind 
me,  even  with  unfaltering  and  delighted  in- 
dustry, many  thousand  artists  spend  their 
lives,  if  the  result  be  regarded,  utterly  in  vain: 
a  thousand  artists,  and  never  one  work  of  art. 
But  the  vast  mass  of  mankind  are  incapable  of 
doing  anything  reasonably  well,  art  among  the 
rest.  The  worthless  artist  would  not  improb- 
ably have  been  a  quite  incompetent  baker. 
And  the  artist,  even  if  he  does  not  amuse  the 
public,  amuses  himself;  so  that  there  will  al- 
ways be  one  man  the  happier  for  his  vigils. 
This  is  the  practical  side  of  art:  its  inexpug- 
nable fortress  for  the  true  practitioner.  The  di- 
rect returns — the  wages  of  the  trade — are 
small,  but  the  indirect — the  wages  of  the  life — 
are  incalculably  great.  No  other  business  offers 
a  man  his  daily  bread  upon  such  joyful  terms. 
The  soldier  and  the  explorer  have  moments  of 
a  worthier  excitement,  but  they  are  purchased 


12  LEARNING  TO  WRITE 

by  cruel  hardships  and  periods  of  tedium  that 
beggar  language.  In  the  life  of  the  artist  there 
need  be  no  hour  without  its  pleasure.  I  take 
the  author,  <with  whose  career  I  am  best  ac- 
quainted; and  it  is  true  he  works  in  a  rebellious 
material,  and  that  the  act  of  writing  is  cramped 
and  trying  both  to  the  eyes  and  the  temper; 
but  remark  him  in  his  study,  when  matter 
crowds  upon  him  and  words  are  not  wanting — in 
what  a  continual  series  of  small  successes  time 
flows  by;  with  what  a  sense  of  power  as  of  one 
moving  mountains,  he  marshals  his  petty  char- 
acters; with  what  pleasures,  both  of  the  ear 
and  eye,  he  sees  his  airy  structure  growing  on 
the  page;  and  how  he  labours  in  a  craft  to 
which  the  whole  material  of  his  life  is  tributary, 
and  which  opens  a  door  to  all  his  tastes,  his 
loves,  his  hatreds,  and  his  convictions,  so  that 
what  he  writes  is  only  what  he  longed  to  utter. 
He  may  have  enjoyed  many  things  in  this  big, 
tragic  playground  of  the  world;  but  what  shall 
he  have  enjoyed  more  fully  than  a  morning  of 
successful  work?  Suppose  it  ill  paid:  the 
wonder  is  it  should  be  paid  at  all.  Other  men 
pay,  and  pay  dearly,  for  pleasures  less  desir- 
able. 

Nor  will  the  practice  of  art  afford  you  pleas- 
ure only;  it  affords  besides  an  admirable  train- 
ing.   For  the  artist  works  entirely  upon  hon- 


TO  A  YOUNG  GENTLEMAN        13 

our.  The  public  knows  little  or  nothing  of 
those  merits  in  the  quest  of  which  you  are  con- 
demned to  spend  the  bulk  of  your  endeavours. 
Merits  of  design,  the  merit  of  first-hand  en- 
ergy, the  merit  of  a  certain  cheap  accomplish- 
ment which  a  man  of  the  artistic  temper  easily 
acquires — these  they  can  recognise,  and  these 
they  value.  But  to  those  more  exquisite  re- 
finements of  proficiency  and  finish,  which  the 
artist  so  ardently  desires  and  so  keenly  feels, 
for  which  (in  the  vigorous  words  of  Balzac)  he 
must  toil  "like  a  miner  buried  in  a  landslip," 
for  which,  day  after  day,  he  recasts  and  revises 
and  rejects — the  gross  mass  of  the  public  must 
be  ever  blind.  To  those  lost  pains,  suppose 
you  attain  the  highest  pitch  of  merit,  posterity 
may  possibly  do  justice;  suppose,  as  is  so  prob- 
able, you  fail  by  even  a  hair's  breadth  of  the 
highest,  rest  certain  they  shall  never  be  ob- 
served. Under  the  shadow  of  this  cold  thought, 
alone  in  his  studio,  the  artist  must  preserve 
from  day  to  day  his  constancy  to  the  ideal.  It 
is  this  which  makes  his  life  noble;  it  is  by  this 
that  the  practice  of  his  craft  strengthens  and  ma- 
tures his  character;  it  is  for  this  that  even  the 
serious  countenance  of  the  great  emperor  was 
turned  approvingly  (if  only  for  a  moment)  on 
the  followers  of  Apollo,  and  that  sternly  gentle 
voice  bade  the  artist  cherish  his  art. 


i4  LEARNING  TO  WRITE 

And  here  there  fall  two  warnings  to  be  made. 
First,  if  you  are  to  continue  to  be  a  law  to  your- 
self, you  must  beware  of  the  first  signs  of  lazi- 
ness. This  idealism  in  honesty  can  only  be 
supported  by  perpetual  effort;  the  standard  is 
easily  lowered,  the  artist  who  says  "//  will 
do"  is  on  the  downward  path;  three  or  four 
pot-boilers  are  enough  at  times  (above  all  at 
wrong  times)  to  falsify  a  talent,  and  by  the  prac- 
tice of  journalism  a  man  runs  the  risk  of  be- 
coming wedded  to  cheap  finish.  This  is  the 
danger  on  the  one  side;  there  is  not  less  upon 
the  other.  The  consciousness  of  how  much  the 
artist  is  (and  must  be)  a  law  to  himself,  de- 
bauches the  small  heads.  Perceiving  recondite 
merits  very  hard  to  attain,  making  or  swallow- 
ing artistic  formulae,  or  perhaps  falling  in  love 
with  some  particular  proficiency  of  his  own, 
many  artists  forget  the  end  of  all  art:  to  please. 
It  is  doubtless  tempting  to  exclaim  against  the 
ignorant  bourgeois;  yet  it  should  not  be  for- 
gotten, it  is  he  who  is  to  pajr  us,  and  that 
(surely  on  the  face  of  it)  for  services  that  he 
shall  desire  to  have  performed.  Here  also,  if 
properly  considered,  there  is  a  question  of 
transcendental  honesty.  To  give  the  public 
what  they  do  not  want,  and  yet  expect  to  be 
supported:  we  have  there  a  strange  pretension, 
and  yet  not  uncommon,  above  all  with  painters. 


TO  A  YOUNG  GENTLEMAN        15 

The  first  duty  in  this  world  is  for  a  man  to  pay 
his  way;  when  that  is  quite  accomplished,  he 
may  plunge  into  what  eccentricity  he  likes;  but 
emphatically  not  till  then.  Till  then,  he  must 
pay  assiduous  court  to  the  bourgeois  who 
carries  the  purse.  And  if  in  the  course  of  these 
capitulations  he  shall  falsify  his  talent,  it  can 
never  have  been  a  strong  one,  and  he  will  have 
preserved  a  better  thing  than  talent — char- 
acter. Or  if  he  be  of  a  mind  so  independent 
that  he  cannot  stoop  to  this  necessity,  one 
course  is  yet  open:  he  can  desist  from  art,  and 
follow  some  more  manly  way  of  life. 

I  speak  of  a  more  manly  way  of  life,  it  is  a 
point  on  which  I  must  be  frank.  To  live  by  a 
pleasure  is  not  a  high  calling;  it  involves  pat- 
ronage, however  veiled;  it  numbers  the  artist, 
however  ambitious,  along  with  dancing  girls 
and  billiard  markers.  The  French  have  a  ro- 
mantic evasion  for  one  employment,  and  call  its 
practitioners  the  Daughters  of  Joy.  The  artist 
is  of  the  same  family,  he  is  of  the  Sons  of  Joy, 
chose  his  trade  to  please  himself,  gains  his  liveli- 
hood by  pleasing  others,  and  has  parted  with 
something  of  the  sterner  dignity  of  man.  Jour- 
nals but  a  little  while  ago  declaimed  against 
the  Tennyson  peerage;  and  this  Son  of  Joy  was 
blamed  for  condescension  when  he  followed  the 
example  of  Lord  Lawrence  and  Lord  Cairns  and 


16  LEARNING  TO  WRITE 

Lord  Clyde.  The  poet  was  more  happily  in- 
spired; with  a  better  modesty  he  accepted  the 
honour;  and  anonymous  journalists  have  not 
yet  (if  I  am  to  believe  them)  recovered  the 
vicarious  disgrace  to  their  profession.  When  it 
comes  to  their  turn,  these  gentlemen  can  do 
themselves  more  justice;  and  I  shall  be  glad  to 
think  of  it;  for  to  my  barbarian  eyesight,  even 
Lord  Tennyson  looks  somewhat  out  of  place  in 
that  assembly.  There  should  be  no  honours 
for  the  artist;  he  has  already,  in  the  practice  of 
his  art,  more  than  his  share  of  the  rewards  of 
life;  the  honours  are  pre-empted  for  other 
trades,  less  agreeable  and  perhaps  more  useful. 

But  the  devil  in  these  trades  of  pleasing  is 
to  fail  to  please.  In  ordinary  occupations,  a 
man  offers  to  do  a  certain  thing  or  to  produce 
a  certain  article  with  a  merely  conventional 
accomplishment,  a  design  in  which  (we  may 
almost  say)  it  is  difficult  to  fail.  But  the  artist 
steps  forth  out  of  the  crowd  and  proposes  to 
delight:  an  impudent  design,  in  which  it  is  im- 
possible to  fail  without  odious  circumstances. 
The  poor  Daughter  of  Joy,  carrying  her  smiles 
and  finery  quite  unregarded  through  the  crowd, 
makes  a  figure  which  it  is  impossible  to  recall 
without  a  wounding  pity.  She  is  the  type  of 
the  unsuccessful  artist.  The  actor,  the  dancer, 
and  the  singer  must  appear  like  her  in  person, 


TO  A  YOUNG  GENTLEMAN        17 

and  drain  publicly  the  cup  of  failure.  But 
though  the  rest  of  us  escape  this  crowning  bit- 
terness of  the  pillory,  we  all  court  in  essence 
the  same  humiliation.  We  all  profess  to  be  y/ 
able  to  delight.  And  how  few  of  us  are!  We 
all  pledge  ourselves  to  be  able  to  continue  to 
delight.  And  the  day  will  come  to  each,  and 
even  to  the  most  admired,  when  the  ardour 
shall  have  declined  and  the  cunning  shall  be 
lost,  and  he  shall  sit  by  his  deserted  booth 
ashamed.  Then  shall  he  see  himself  con- 
demned to  do  work  for  which  he  blushes  to  take 
payment.  Then  (as  if  his  lot  were  not  already 
cruel)  he  must  lie  exposed  to  the  gibes  of  the  v 
wreckers  of  the  press,  who  earn  a  little  bitter 
bread  by  the  condemnation  of  trash  which  they 
have  not  read,  and  the  praise  of  excellence 
which  they  cannot  understand. 

And  observe  that  this  seems  almost  the  neces- 
sary end  at  least  of  writers.  Les  Blancs  et  les 
Bleus  (for  instance)  is  of  an  order  of  merit  very 
different  from  Le  Vicomte  de  Bragelonne;  and 
if  any  gentleman  can  bear  to  spy  upon  the 
nakedness  of  Castle  Dangerous,  his  name  I 
think  is  Ham:  let  it  be  enough  for  the  rest  of 
us  to  read  of  it  (not  without  tears)  in  the  pages 
of  Lockhart.  Thus  in  old  age,  when  occupa- 
tion and  comfort  are  most  needful,  the  writer 
must  lay  aside  at  once  his  pastime  and  his 


18  LEARNING  TO  WRITE 

breadwinner.  The  painter  indeed,  if  he  suc- 
ceed at  all  in  engaging  the  attention  of  the  pub- 
lic, gains  great  sums  and  can  stand  to  his 
easel  until  a  great  age  without  dishonourable 
failure.  The  writer  has  the  double  misfortune 
to  be  ill-paid  while  he  can  work,  and  to  be  in- 
capable of  working  when  he  is  old.  It  is  thus 
a  way  of  life  which  conducts  directly  to  a  false 
position. 

For  the  writer  (in  spite  of  notorious  examples 
to  the  contrary)  must  look  to  be  ill-paid. 
Tennyson  and  Montepin  make  handsome  live- 
lihoods; but  we  cannot  all  hope  to  be  Tenny- 
son, and  we  do  not  all  perhaps  desne  to  be 
Montepin.  If  you  adopt  an  art  to  be  your 
trade,  weed  your  mind  at  the  outset  of  all  de- 
sire of  money.  What  you  may  decently  expect, 
if  you  have  some  talent  and  much  industry,  is 
such  an  income  as  a  clerk  will  earn  with  a  tenth 
or  perhaps  a  twentieth  of  your  nervous  output. 
Nor  have  you  the  right  to  look  for  more;  in  the 
wages  of  the  life,  not  in  the  wages  of  the  trade, 
lies  your  reward;  the  work  is  here  the  wages. 
It  will  be  seen  I  have  little  sympathy  with  the 
common  lamentations  of  the  artist  class.  Per- 
haps they  do  not  remember  the  hire  of  the 
field  labourer;  or  do  they  think  no  parallel  will 
lie?  Perhaps  they  have  never  observed  what 
is  the  retiring  allowance  of  a  field  officer;  or  do 


TO  A  YOUNG  GENTLEMAN        19 

they  suppose  their  contributions  to  the  arts  of 
pleasing  more  important  than  the  services  of  a 
colonel?  Perhaps  they  forget  on  how  little 
Millet  was  content  to  live;  or  do  they  think, 
because  they  have  less  genius,  they  stand  ex- 
cused from  the  display  of  equal  virtues?  But 
upon  one  point  there  should  be  no  dubiety:  if  a 
man  be  not  frugal,  he  has  no  business  in  the 
arts.  If  he  be  not  frugal,  he  steers  directly  for 
that  last  tragic  scene  of  le  vieux  saltimbanque; 
if  he  be  not  frugal,  he  will  find  it  hard  to  con- 
tinue to  be  honest.  Some  day,  when  the  butcher 
is  knocking  at  the  door,  he  may  be  tempted,  he 
may  be  obliged,  to  turn  out  and  sell  a  slovenly 
piece  of  work.  If  the  obligation  shall  have 
arisen  through  no  wantonness  of  his  own,  he  is 
even  to  be  commended;  for  words  cannot  de- 
scribe how  far  more  necessary  it  is  that  a  man 
should  support  his  family,  than  that  he  should 
attain  to — or  preserve — distinction  in  the  arts. 
But  if  the  pressure  comes  through  his  own 
fault,  he  has  stolen,  and  stolen  under  trust,  and 
stolen  (which  is  the  worst  of  all)  in  such  a  way 
that  no  law  can  reach  him. 

And  now  you  may  perhaps  ask  me,  if  the 
debutant  artist  is  to  have  no  thought  of  money, 
and  if  (as  is  implied)  he  is  to  expect  no  honours 
from  the  State,  he  may  not  at  least  look  for- 
ward to  the  delights  of  popularity?     Praise, 


2o  LEARNING  TO  WRITE 

you  will  tell  me,  is  a  savoury  dish.  And  in  so 
far  as  you  may  mean  the  countenance  of  other 
artists,  you  would  put  your  finger  on  one  of  the 
most  essential  and  enduring  pleasures  of  the 
career  of  art.  But  in  so  far  as  you  should  have 
an  eye  to  the  commendations  of  the  public  or 
the  notice  of  the  newspapers,  be  sure  you  would 
but  be  cherishing  a  dream.  It  is  true  that  in 
certain  esoteric  journals  the  author  (for  in- 
stance) is  duly  criticised,  and  that  he  is  often 
praised  a  great  deal  more  than  he  deserves, 
sometimes  for  qualities  which  he  prided  him- 
self on  eschewing,  and  sometimes  by  ladies 
and  gentlemen  who  have  denied  themselves 
the  privilege  of  reading  his  work.  But  if  a 
man  be  sensitive  to  this  wild  praise,  we  must 
suppose  him  equally  alive  to  that  which  often 
accompanies  and  always  follows  it — wild  ridi- 
cule. A  man  may  have  done  well  for  years, 
and  then  he  may  fail;  he  will  hear  of  his  fail- 
ure. Or  he  may  have  done  well  for  years,  and 
still  do  well,  but  the  critics  may  have  tired  of 
praising  him,  or  there  may  have  sprung  up  some 
new  idol  of  the  instant,  some  "dust  a  little 
gilt,"  to  whom  they  now  prefer  to  offer  sacri- 
fice. Here  is  the  obverse  and  the  reverse  of 
that  empty  and  ugly  thing  called  popularity. 
Will  any  man  suppose  it  worth  the  gaining? 


m 

A  NOTE  ON  REALISM  * 

Style  is  the  invariable  mark  of  any  master; 
and  for  the  student  who  does  not  aspire  so 
high  as  to  be  numbered  with  the  giants,  it  is 
still  the  one  quality  in  which  he  may  improve 
himself  at  will.  Passion,  wisdom,  creative 
force,  the  power  of  mystery  or  colour,  are  al- 
lotted in  the  hour  of  birth,  and  can  be  neither 
learned  nor  simulated.  But  the  just  and  dex- 
terous use  of  what  qualities  we  have,  the  pro- 
portion of  one  part  to  another  and  to  the  whole, 
the  elision  of  the  useless,  the  accentuation  of 
the  important,  and  the  preservation  of  a  uni- 
form character  from  end  to  end — these,  which 
taken  together  constitute  technical  perfection, 
are  to  some  degree  within  the  reach  of  industry 
and  intellectual  courage.  What  to  put  in  and 
what  to  leave  out;  whether  some  particular 
fact  be  organically  necessary  or  purely  orna- 
mental; whether,  if  it  be  purely  ornamental,  it 
may  not  weaken  or  obscure  the  general  design; 
and  finally,  whether,  if  we  decide  to  use  it,  we 
*  First  published  in  the  Magazine  of  Art  in  1883. 

21 


22  LEARNING  TO  WRITE 

should  do  so  grossly  and  notably,  or  in  some 
conventional  disguise:  are  questions  of  plastic 
style  continually  rearising.  And  the  sphinx 
that  patrols  the  highways  of  executive  art  has 
no  more  unanswerable  riddle  to  propound. 

In  literature  (from  which  I  must  draw  my 
instances)  the  great  change  of  the  past  century 
has  been  effected  by  the  admission  of  detail. 
It  was  inaugurated  by  the  romantic  Scott;  and 
at  length,  by  the  semi-romantic  Balzac  and  his 
more  or  less  wholly  unromantic  followers,  bound 
like  a  duty  on  the  novelist.  For  some  time  it 
signified  and  expressed  a  more  ample  contem- 
plation of  the  conditions  of  man's  life;  but  it 
has  recently  (at  least  in  France)  fallen  into  a 
merely  technical  and  decorative  stage,  which  it 
is,  perhaps,  still  too  harsh  to  call  survival. 
With  a  movement  of  alarm,  the  wiser  or  more 
timid  begin  to  fall  a  little  back  from  these  ex- 
tremities; they  begin  to  aspire  after  a  more 
naked,  narrative  articulation;  after  the  suc- 
cinct, the  dignified,  and  the  poetic;  and  as  a 
means  to  this,  after  a  general  lightening  of  this 
baggage  of  detail.  After  Scott  we  beheld  the 
starveling  story — once,  in  the  hands  of  Vol- 
taire, as  abstract  as  a  parable — begin  to  be 
pampered  upon  facts.  The  introduction  of 
these  details  developed  a  particular  ability  of 
hand;  and  that  ability,  childishly  indulged,  has 


A  NOTE  ON  REALISM  23 

led  to  the  works  that  now  amaze  us  on  a  rail- 
way journey.  A  man  of  the  unquestionable 
force  of  M.  Zola  spends  himself  on  technical 
successes.  To  afford  a  popular  flavour  and  at- 
tract the  mob,  he  adds  a  steady  current  of 
what  I  may  be  allowed  to  call  the  rancid. 
That  is  exciting  to  the  moralist;  but  what  more 
particularly  interests  the  artist  is  this  tendency 
of  the  extreme  of  detail,  when  followed  as  a 
principle,  to  degenerate  into  mere  feux-de-joie 
of  literary  tricking.  The  other  day  even  M. 
Daudet  was  to  be  heard  babbling  of  audible 
colours  and  visible  sounds. 

This  odd  suicide  of  one  branch  of  the  realists 
may  serve  to  remind  us  of  the  fact  which  un- 
derlies a  very  dusty  conflict  of  the  critics.  All 
representative  art,  which  can  be  said  to  live,  is 
both  realistic  and  ideal;  and  the  realism  about 
which  we  quarrel  is  a  matter  purely  of  externals. 
It  is  no  especial  cultus  of  nature  and  veracity, 
but  a  mere  whim  of  veering  fashion,  that  has 
made  us  turn  our  back  upon  the  larger,  more 
various,  and  more  romantic  art  of  yore.  A 
photographic  exactitude  in  dialogue  is  now  the 
exclusive  fashion;  but  even  in  the  ablest  hands 
it  tells  us  no  more — I  think  it  even  tells  us  less 
— than  Moliere,  wielding  his  artificial  medium, 
has  told  to  us  and  to  all  time  of  Alceste  or 
Orgon,   Dorine   or    Chrysale.     The   historical 


24  LEARNING  TO  WRITE 

novel  is  forgotten.  Yet  truth  to  the  conditions 
of  man's  nature  and  the  conditions  of  man's 
life,  the  truth  of  literary  art,  is  free  of  the  ages. 
It  may  be  told  us  in  a  carpet  comedy,  in  a 
novel  of  adventure,  or  a  fairy  tale.  The  scene 
may  be  pitched  in  London,  on  the  sea-coast  of 
Bohemia,  or  away  on  the  mountains  of  Beulah. 
And  by  an  odd  and  luminous  accident,  if  there 
is  any  page  of  literature  calculated  to  awake 
the  envy  of  M.  Zola,  it  must  be  that  Troilus 
and  Cressida  which  Shakespeare,  in  a  spasm  of 
unmanly  anger  with  the  world,  grafted  on  the 
heroic  story  of  the  siege  of  Troy. 

This  question  of  realism,  let  it  then  be  clearly 
understood,  regards  not  in  the  least  degree  the 
fundamental  truth,  but  only  the  technical 
method,  of  a  work  of  art.  Be  as  ideal  or  as 
abstract  as  you  please,  you  will  be  none  the 
less  veracious;  but  if  you  be  weak,  you  run  the 
risk  of  being  tedious  and  inexpressive;  and  if 
you  be  very  strong  and  honest,  you  may  chance 
upon  a  masterpiece. 

A  work  of  art  is  first  cloudily  conceived  in 
the  mind;  during  the  period  of  gestation  it 
stands  more  clearly  forward  from  these  swad- 
dling mists,  puts  on  expressive  lineaments,  and 
becomes  at  length  that  most  faultless,  but  also, 
alas!  that  incommunicable  product  of  the  hu- 
man mind,  a  perfected  design.     On  the  ap- 


A  NOTE  ON  REALISM  25 

proach  to  execution  all  is  changed.  The  artist 
must  now  step  down,  don  his  working  clothes, 
and  become  the  artisan.  He  now  resolutely 
commits  his  airy  conception,  his  delicate  Ariel, 
to  the  touch  of  matter;  he  must  decide,  almost 
in  a  breath,  the  scale,  the  style,  the  spirit,  and 
the  particularity  of  execution  of  his  whole  de- 
sign. 

The  engendering  idea  of  some  works  is  sty- 
listic; a  technical  preoccupation  stands  them 
instead  of  some  robuster  principle  of  life.  And 
with  these  the  execution  is  but  play;  for  the 
stylistic  problem  is  resolved  beforehand,  and 
all  large  originality  of  treatment  wilfully  fore- 
gone. Such  are  the  verses,  intricately  designed, 
which  we  have  learnt  to  admire,  with  a  certain 
smiling  admiration,  at  the  hands  of  Mr.  Lang 
and  Mr.  Dobson;  such,  too,  are  those  canvases 
where  dexterity  or  even  breadth  of  plastic  style 
takes  the  place  of  pictorial  nobility  of  design. 
So,  it  may  be  remarked,  it  was  easier  to  begin 
to  write  Esmond  than  Vanity  Fair,  since,  in 
the  first,  the  style  was  dictated  by  the  nature 
of  the  plan;  and  Thackeray,  a  man  probably  of 
some  indolence  of  mind,  enjoyed  and  got  good 
profit  of  this  economy  of  effort.  But  the  case 
is  exceptional.  Usually  in  all  works  of  art  that 
have  been  conceived  from  within  outwards, 
and  generously  nourished   from   the  author's 


26  LEARNING  TO  WRITE 

mind,  the  moment  in  which  he  begins  to  exe- 
cute is  one  of  extreme  perplexity  and  strain. 
Artists  of  indifferent  energy  and  an  imperfect 
devotion  to  their  own  ideal  make  this  ungrate- 
ful effort  once  for  all;  and,  having  formed  a 
style,  adhere  to  it  through  life.  But  those  of  a 
higher  order  cannot  rest  content  with  a  process 
which,  as  they  continue  to  employ  it,  must  in- 
fallibly degenerate  towards  the  academic  and 
the  cut-and-dried.  Every  fresh  work  in  which 
they  embark  is  the  signal  for  a  fresh  engage- 
ment of  the  whole  forces  of  their  mind;  and  the 
changing  views  which  accompany  the  growth  of 
their  experience  are  marked  by  still  more  sweep- 
ing alterations  in  the  manner  of  their  art.  So 
that  criticism  loves  to  dwell  upon  and  distin- 
guish the  varying  periods  of  a '  Raphael,  a 
Shakespeare,  or  a  Beethoven. 

It  is,  then,  first  of  all,  at  this  initial  and  de- 
cisive moment  when  execution  is  begun,  and 
thenceforth  only  in  a  less  degree,  that  the  ideal 
and  the  real  do  indeed,  like  good  and  evil 
angels,  contend  for  the  direction  of  the  work. 
Marble,  paint,  and  language,  the  pen,  the 
needle,  and  the  brush,  all  have  their  gross- 
nesses,  their  ineffable  impotences,  their  hours, 
if  I  may  so  express  myself,  of  insubordination. 
It  is  the  work  and  it  is  a  great  part  of  the  delight 
of  any  artist  to  contend  with  these  unruly 


A  NOTE  ON  REALISM  27 

tools,  and  now  by  brute  energy,  now  by  witty 
expedient,  to  drive  and  coax  them  to  effect  his 
will.  Given  these  means,  so  laughably  inade- 
quate, and  given  the  interest,  the  intensity,  and 
the  multiplicity  of  the  actual  sensation  whose 
effect  he  is  to  render  with  their  aid,  the  artist 
has  one  main  and  necessary  resource  which  he 
must,  in  every  case  and  upon  any  theory,  em- 
ploy. He  must,  that  is,  suppress  much  and 
omit  more.  He  must  omit  what  is  tedious  or 
irrelevant,  and  suppress  what  is  tedious  and 
necessary.  But  such  facts  as,  in  regard  to  the 
main  design,  subserve  a  variety  of  purposes,  he 
will  perforce  and  eagerly  retain.  And  it  is  the 
mark  of  the  very  highest  order  of  creative  art 
to  be  woven  exclusively  of  such.  There,  any 
fact  that  is  registered  is  contrived  a  double  or  a 
treble  debt  to  pay,  and  is  at  once  an  ornament 
in  its  place,  and  a  pillar  in  the  main  design. 
Nothing  would  find  room  in  such  a  picture 
that  did  not  serve,  at  once,  to  complete  the 
composition,  to  accentuate  the  scheme  of  col- 
our, to  distinguish  the  planes  of  distance,  and 
to  strike  the  note  of  the  selected  sentiment; 
nothing  would  be  allowed  in  such  a  story  that 
did  not,  at  the  same  time,  expedite  the  prog- 
ress of  the  fable,  build  up  the  characters,  and 
strike  home  the  moral  or  the  philosophical  de- 
sign.   But  this  is  unattainable.    As  a  rule,  so 


28  LEARNING  TO  WRITE 

far  from  building  the  fabric  of  our  works  ex- 
clusively with  these,  we  are  thrown  into  a 
rapture  if  we  think  we  can  muster  a  dozen  or  a 
score  of  them,  to  be  the  plums  of  our  confection. 
And  hence,  in  order  that  the  canvas  may  be 
filled  or  the  story  proceed  from  point  to  point, 
other  details  must  be  admitted.  They  must  be 
admitted,  alas!  upon  a  doubtful  title;  many 
without  marriage  robes.  Thus  any  work  of 
art,  as  it  proceeds  towards  completion,  too  often 
— I  had  almost  written  always — loses  in  force 
and  poignancy  of  main  design.  Our  little  air 
is  swamped  and  dwarfed  among  hardly  relevant 
orchestration;  our  little  passionate  story  drowns 
in  a  deep  sea  of  descriptive  eloquence  or  slip- 
shod talk. 

But  again,  we  are  rather  more  tempted  to 
admit  those  particulars  which  we  know  we  can 
describe;  and  hence  those  most  of  all  which, 
having  been  described  very  often,  have  grown 
to  be  conventionally  treated  in  the  practice  of 
our  art.  These  we  choose,  as  the  mason  chooses 
the  acanthus  to  adorn  his  capital,  because  they 
come  naturally  to  the  accustomed  hand.  The 
old  stock  incidents  and  accessories,  tricks  of 
workmanship  and  schemes  of  composition  (all 
being  admirably  good,  or  they  would  long  have 
been  forgotten)  haunt  and  tempt  our  fancy, 
offer  us  ready-made  but  not  perfectly  appro- 


A  NOTE  ON  REALISM  29 

priate  solutions  for  any  problem  that  arises, 
and  wean  us  from  the  study  of  nature  and  the 
uncompromising  practice  of  art.  To  struggle, 
to  face  nature,  to  rind  fresh  solutions,  and  give 
expression  to  facts  which  have  not  yet  been 
adequately  or  not  yet  elegantly  expressed,  is 
to  run  a  little  upon  the  danger  of  extreme  self- 
love.  Difficulty  sets  a  high  price  upon  achieve- 
ment; and  the  artist  may  easily  fall  into  the 
error  of  the  French  naturalists,  and  consider 
any  fact  as  welcome  to  admission  if  it  be  the 
ground  of  brilliant  handiwork;  or,  again,  into 
the  error  of  the  modern  landscape-painter,  who 
is  apt  to  think  that  difficulty  overcome  and 
science  well  displayed  can  take  the  place  of 
what  is,  after  all,  the  one  excuse  and  breath  of 
art — charm.  A  little  further,  and  he  will  re- 
gard charm  in  the  light  of  an  unworthy  sacri- 
fice to  prettiness,  and  the  omission  of  a  tedious 
passage  as  an  infidelity  to  art. 

We  have  now  the  matter  of  this  difference 
before  us.  The  idealist,  his  eye  singly  fixed 
upon  the  greater  outlines,  loves  rather  to  fill  up 
the  interval  with  detail  of  the  conventional 
order,  briefly  touched,  soberly  suppressed  in 
tone,  courting  neglect.  But  the  realist,  with  a 
fine  intemperance,  will  not  suffer  the  presence 
of  anything  so  dead  as  a  convention;  he  shall 
have  all  fiery,  all  hot-pressed  from  nature,  all 


3o  LEARNING  TO  WRITE 

charactered  and  notable,  seizing  the  eye.  The 
style  that  befits  either  of  these  extremes,  once 
chosen,  brings  with  it  its  necessary  disabilities 
and  dangers.  The  immediate  danger  of  the 
realist  is  to  sacrifice  the  beauty  and  significance 
of  the  whole  to  local  dexterity,  or,  in  the  insane 
pursuit  of  completion,  to  immolate  his  readers 
under  facts;  but  he  comes  in  the  last  resort, 
and  as  his  energy  declines,  to  discard  all  de- 
sign, abjure  all  choice,  and,  with  scientific  thor- 
oughness, steadily  to  communicate  matter 
which  is  not  worth  learning.  The  danger  of 
the  idealist  is,  of  course,  to  become  merely  null 
and  lose  all  grip  of  fact,  particularity,  or  passion. 
We  talk  of  bad  and  good.  Everything,  in- 
deed, is  good  which  is  conceived  with  honesty 
and  executed  with  communicative  ardour.  But 
though  on  neither  side  is  dogmatism  fitting,  and 
though  in  every  case  the  artist  must  decide  for 
himself,  and  decide  afresh  and  yet  afresh  for 
each  succeeding  work  and  new  creation;  yet 
one  thing  may  be  generally  said,  that  we  of  the 
last  quarter  of  the  nineteenth  century,  breath- 
ing as  we  do  the  intellectual  atmosphere  of  our 
age,  are  more  apt  to  err  upon  the  side  of  realism 
than  to  sin  in  quest  of  the  ideal.  Upon  that 
theory  it  may  be  well  to  watch  and  correct  our 
own  decisions,  always  holding  back  the  hand 
from  the  least  appearance  of  irrelevant  dexter- 


A  NOTE  ON  REALISM  31 

ity,  and  resolutely  fixed  to  begin  no  work  that 
is  not  philosophical,  passionate,  dignified,  hap- 
pily mirthful,  or,  at  the  last  and  least,  romantic 
in  design. 


IV 


BOOKS  WHICH  HAVE  INFLUENCED 
ME* 

The  Editor  f  has  somewhat  insidiously  laid  a 
trap  for  his  correspondents,  the  question  put 
appearing  at  first  so  innocent,  truly  cutting  so 
deep.  It  is  not,  indeed,  until  after  some  recon- 
naissance and  review  that  the  writer  awakes  to 
find  himself  engaged  upon  something  in  the 
nature  of  autobiography,  or,  perhaps  worse, 
upon  a  chapter  in  the  life  of  that  little,  beautiful 
brother  whom  we  once  all  had,  and  whom  we 
have  all  lost  and  mourned,  the  man  we  ought 
to  have  been,  the  man  we  hoped  to  be.  But 
when  word  has  been  passed  (even  to  an  editor) 
it  should,  if  possible,  be  kept;  and  if  some- 
times I  am  wise  and  say  too  little,  and  some- 
times weak  and  say  too  much,  the  blame  must 
lie  at  the  door  of  the  person  who  entrapped  me. 

The  most  influential  books,  and  the  truest  in 
their  influence,  are  works  of  fiction.  They  do 
not  pin  the  reader  to  a  dogma,  which  he  must 

*  First  published  in  the  British  Weekly,  May  13,  1887. 
t  Of  the  British  Weekly. 

33 


BOOKS  WHICH  INFLUENCED  ME    33 

afterwards  discover  to  be  inexact;  they  do  not 
teach  him  a  lesson,  which  he  must  afterwards 
unlearn.  They  repeat,  they  rearrange,  they 
clarify  the  lessons  of  life;  they  disengage  us 
from  ourselves,  they  constrain  us  to  the  ac- 
quaintance of  others;  and  they  show  us  the 
web  of  experience,  not  as  we  can  see  it  for  our- 
selves, but  with  a  singular  change — that  mon- 
strous, consuming  ego  of  ours  being,  for  the 
nonce,  struck  out.  To  be  so,  they  must  be 
reasonably  true  to  the  human  comedy;  and  any 
work  that  is  so  serves  the  turn  of  instruction. 
But  the  course  of  our  education  is  answered 
best  by  those  poems  and  romances  where  we 
breathe  a  magnanimous  atmosphere  of  thought 
and  meet  generous  and  pious  characters. 
Shakespeare  has  served  me  best.  Few  living 
friends  have  had  upon  me  an  influence  so 
strong  for  good  as  Hamlet  or  Rosalind.  The 
last  character,  already  well  beloved  in  the  read- 
ing, I  had  the  good  fortune  to  see,  I  must  think, 
in  an  impressionable  hour,  played  by  Mrs. 
Scott  Siddons.  Nothing  has  ever  more  moved, 
more  delighted,  more  refreshed  me;  nor  has  the 
influence  quite  passed  away.  Kent's  brief 
speech  over  the  dying  Lear  had  a  great  effect 
upon  my  mind,  and  was  the  burthen  of  my  re- 
flections for  long,  so  profoundly,  so  touchingly 
generous  did  it  appear  in  sense,  so  overpowering 


CO 


/ 


34  LEARNING  TO  WRITE 

in  expression.  Perhaps  my  dearest  and  best 
friend  outside  of  Shakespeare  is  D'Artagnan — 
the  elderly  D'Artagnan  of  the  Vicomte  de 
Bragelonne.  I  know  not  a  more  human  soul, 
nor,  in  his  way,  a  finer;  I  shall  be  very  sorry  for 
the  man  who  is  so  much  of  a  pedant  in  morals 
that  he  cannot  learn  from  the  Captain  of  Mus- 
keteers. Lastly,  I  must  name  the  Pilgrim's 
Progress,  a,  book  that  breathes  of  every  beauti- 
ful and  valuable  emotion. 

But  of  works  of  art  little  can  be  said;  their 
influence  is  profound  and  silent,  like  the  influ- 
ence of  nature;  they  mould  by  contact;  we  drink 
them  up  like  water,  and  are  bettered,  yet  know 
not  how.  It  is  in  books  more  specifically  di- 
dactic that  we  can  follow  out  the  effect,  and 
distinguish  and  weigh  and  compare.  A  book 
which  has  been  very  influential  upon  me  fell 
early  into  my  hands,  and  so  may  stand  first, 
though  I  think  its  influence  was  only  sensible 
later  on,  and  perhaps  still  keeps  growing,  for 
it  is  a  book  not  easily  outlived:  the  Essais  of 
Montaigne.  That  temperate  and  genial  pic- 
ture of  life  is  a  great  gift  to  place  in  the  hands 
of  persons  of  to-day;  they  will  find  in  these 
smiling  pages  a  magazine  of  heroism  and  wis- 
dom, all  of  an  antique  strain;  they  will  have 
their  "linen  decencies"  and  excited  ortho- 
doxies fluttered,  and  will   (if  they  have  any 


BOOKS  WHICH  INFLUENCED  ME    35 

gift  of  reading)  perceive  that  these  have  not 
been  fluttered  without  some  excuse  and  ground 
of  reason;  and  (again  if  they  have  any  gift  of 
reading)  they  will  end  by  seeing  that  this  old 
gentleman  was  in  a  dozen  ways  a  finer  fellow, 
and  held  in  a  dozen  ways  a  nobler  view  of  life, 
than  they  or  their  contemporaries. 

The  next  book,  in  order  of  time,  to  influence 
me,  was  the  New  Testament,  and  in  particular 
the  Gospel  according  to  St.  Matthew.  I  be- 
lieve it  would  startle  and  move  any  one  if  they 
could  make  a  certain  effort  of  imagination  and 
read  it  freshly  like  a  book,  not  droningly  and 
dully  like  a  portion  of  the  Bible.  Any  one 
would  then  be  able  to  see  in  it  those  truths 
which  we  are  all  courteously  supposed  to  know 
and  all  modestly  refrain  from  applying.  But 
upon  this  subject  it  is  perhaps  better  to  be 
silent. 

I  come  next  to  Whitman's  Leaves  of  Grass,  a 
book  of  singular  service,  a  book  which  tumbled 
the  world  upside  down  for  me,  blew  into  space 
a  thousand  cobwebs  of  genteel  and  ethical  il- 
lusion, and,  having  thus  shaken  my  tabernacle 
of  lies,  set  me  back  again  upon  a  strong  founda- 
tion of  all  the  original  and  manly  virtues.  But 
it  is,  once  more,  only  a  book  for  those  who  have 
the  gift  of  reading.  I  will  be  very  frank — I  be- 
lieve it  is  so  with  all  good  books  except,  per- 


36  LEARNING  TO  WRITE 

haps,  fiction.  The  average  man  lives,  and  must 
live,  so  wholly  in  convention,  that  gunpowder 
charges  of  the  truth  are  more  apt  to  discompose 
than  to  invigorate  his  creed.  Either  he  cries 
out  upon  blasphemy  and  indecency,  and  crouches 
the  closer  round  that  little  idol  of  part-truths 
and  part-conveniences  which  is  the  contempo- 
rary deity,  or  he  is  convinced  by  what  is  new, 
forgets  what  is  old,  and  becomes  truly  blas- 
phemous and  indecent  himself.  New  truth  is 
only  useful  to  supplement  the  old;  rough  truth 
is  only  wanted  to  expand,  not  to  destroy,  our 
civil  and  often  elegant  conventions.  He  who 
cannot  judge  had  better  stick  to  fiction  and  the 
daily  papers.  There  he  will  get  little  harm, 
and,  in  the  first  at  least,  some  good. 

Close  upon  the  back  of  my  discovery  of 
Whitman,  I  came  under  the  influence  of  Her- 
bert Spencer.  No  more  persuasive  rabbi  ex- 
ists, and  few  better.  How  much  of  his  vast 
structure  will  bear  the  touch  of  time,  how 
much  is  clay  and  how  much  brass,  it  were  too 
curious  to  inquire.  But  his  words,  if  dry,  are 
always  manly  and  honest;  there  dwells  in  his 
pages  a  spirit  of  highly  abstract  joy,  plucked 
naked  like  an  algebraic  symbol  but  still  joyful; 
and  the  reader  will  find  there  a  caput  mortuum 
of  piety,  with  little  indeed  of  its  loveliness,  but 
with  most  of  its  essentials;  and  these  two  qual- 


BOOKS  WHICH  INFLUENCED  ME    37 

ities  make  him  a  wholesome,  as  his  intellectual 
vigour  makes  him  a  bracing,  writer.  I  should 
be  much  of  a  hound  if  I  lost  my  gratitude  to 
Herbert  Spencer. 

Goethe's  Life,  by  Lewes,  had  a  great  impor- 
tance for  me  when  it  first  fell  into  my  hands — a 
strange  instance  of  the  partiality  of  man's 
good  and  man's  evil.  I  know  no  one  whom  I 
less  admire  than  Goethe;  he  seems  a  very  epit- 
ome of  the  sins  of  genius,  breaking  open  the 
doors  of  private  life,  and  wantonly  wounding 
friends,  in  that  crowning  offence  of  Werther, 
and  in  his  own  character  a  mere  pen-and-ink 
Napoleon,  conscious  of  the  rights  and  duties 
of  superior  talents  as  a  Spanish  inquisitor  was 
conscious  of  the  rights  and  duties  of  his  office. 
And  yet  in  his  fine  devotion  to  his  art,  in  his 
honest  and  serviceable  friendship  for  Schiller, 
what  lessons  are  contained!  Biography,  usu- 
ally so  false  to  its  office,  does  here  for  once 
perform  for  us  some  of  the  work  of  fiction,  re- 
minding us,  that  is,  of  the  truly  mingled  tissue 
of  man's  nature,  and  how  huge  faults  and  shin- 
ing virtues  cohabit  and  persevere  in  the  same 
character.  History  serves  us  well  to  this  effect, 
but  in  the  originals,  not  in  the  pages  of  the 
popular  epitomiser,  who  is  bound,  by  the  very 
nature  of  his  task,  to  make  us  feel  the  difference 
of  epochs  instead  of  the  essential  identity  of 


38  LEARNING  TO  WRITE 

man,  and  even  in  the  originals  only  to  those 
who  can  recognise  their  own  human  virtues  and 
defects  in  strange  forms,  often  inverted  and 
under  strange  names,  often  interchanged.  Mar- 
tial is  a  poet  of  no  good  repute,  and  it  gives  a 
man  new  thoughts  to  read  his  works  dispassion- 
ately, and  find  in  this  unseemly  jester's  serious 
passages  the  image  of  a  kind,  wise,  and  self- 
respecting  gentleman.  It  is  customary,  I  sup- 
pose, in  reading  Martial,  to  leave  out  these 
pleasant  verses;  I  never  heard  of  them,  at 
least,  until  I  found  them  for  myself;  and  this 
partiality  is  one  among  a  thousand  things  that 
help  to  build  up  our  distorted  and  hysterical 
conception  of  the  great  Roman  Empire. 

This  brings  us  by  a  natural  transition  to  a 
very  noble  book — the  Meditations  of  Marcus 
Aurelius.  The  dispassionate  gravity,  the  noble 
forgetfulness  of  self,  the  tenderness  of  others, 
that  are  there  expressed  and  were  practised  on 
so  great  a  scale  in  the  life  of  its  writer,  make 
this  book  a  book  quite  by  itself.  No  one  can 
read  it  and  not  be  moved.  Yet  it  scarcely  or 
rarely  appeals  to  the  feelings — those  very  mo- 
bile, those  not  very  trusty  parts  of  man.  Its 
address  lies  further  back:  its  lesson  comes 
more  deeply  home;  when  you  have  read,  you 
carry  away  with  you  a  memory  of  the  man 


BOOKS  WHICH  INFLUENCED  ME    39 

himself;  it  is  as  though  you  had  touched  a  loyal 
hand,  looked  into  brave  eyes,  and  made  a  noble 
friend;  there  is  another  bond  on  you  thencefor- 
ward, binding  you  to  life  and  to  the  love  of 
virtue. 

Wordsworth  should  perhaps  come  next. 
Every  one  has  been  influenced  by  Wordsworth, 
and  it  is  hard  to  tell  precisely  how.  A  certain 
innocence,  a  rugged  austerity  of  joy,  a  sight  of 
the  stars,  "the  silence  that  is  in  the  lonely 
hills,"  something  of  the  cold  thrill  of  dawn, 
cling  to  his  work  and  give  it  a  particular  ad- 
dress to  what  is  best  in  us.  I  do  not  know  that 
you  learn  a  lesson;  you  need  not — Mill  did  not 
— agree  with  any  one  of  his  beliefs;  and  yet 
the  spell  is  cast.  Such  are  the  best  teachers:  a 
dogma  learned  is  only  a  new  error — the  old  one 
was  perhaps  as  good;  but  a  spirit  communi- 
cated is  a  perpetual  possession.  These  best 
teachers  climb  beyond  teaching  to  the  plane  of 
art;  it  is  themselves,  and  what  is  best  in  them- 
selves, that  they  communicate. 

I  should  never  forgive  myself  if  I  forgot  The 
Egoist.  It  is  art,  if  you  like,  but  it  belongs 
purely  to  didactic  art,  and  from  all  the  novels 
I  have  read  (and  I  have  read  thousands)  stands 
in  a  place  by  itself.  Here  is  a  Nathan  for  the 
modern  David:  here  is  a  book  to  send  the  blood 


4o  LEARNING  TO  WRITE 

into  men's  faces.  Satire,  the  angry  picture  of 
human  faults,  is  not  great  art;  we  can  all  be 
angry  with  our  neighbour;  what  we  want  is  to 
be  shown,  not  his  defects,  of  which  we  are  too 
conscious,  but  his  merits,  to  which  we  are  too 
blind.  And  The  Egoist  is  a  satire;  so  much 
must  be  allowed;  but  it  is  a  satire  of  a  singular 
quality,  which  tells  you  nothing  of  that  obvi- 
ous mote,  which  is  engaged  from  first  to  last 
with  that  invisible  beam.  It  is  yourself  that  is 
hunted  down;  these  are  your  own  faults  that 
are  dragged  into  the  day  and  numbered,  with 
lingering  relish,  with  cruel  cunning  and  pre- 
cision. A  young  friend  of  Mr.  Meredith's  (as 
I  have  the  story)  came  to  him  in  an  agony. 
"This  is  too  bad  of  you,"  he  cried.  "  Willoughby 
is  me!"  "No,  my  dear  fellow,"  said  the  au- 
thor; "he  is  all  of  us."  I  have  read  The  Egoist 
five  or  six  times  myself,  and  I  mean  to  read  it 
again;  for  I  am  like  the  young  friend  of  the 
anecdote — I  think  Willoughby  an  unmanly 
but  a  very  serviceable  exposure  of  myself. 

I  suppose,  when  I  am  done,  I  shall  find  that 
I  have  forgotten  much  that  was  most  influen- 
tial, as  I  see  already  I  have  forgotten  Thoreau, 
and  Hazlitt,  whose  paper  "On  the  Spirit  of 
Obligations"  was  a  turning-point  in  my  life, 
and  Penn,  whose  little  book  of  aphorisms  had  a 


BOOKS  WHICH  INFLUENCED  ME    41 

brief  but  strong  effect  on  me,  and  Mitford's 
Tales  of  Old  Japan,  wherein  I  learned  for  the 
first  time  the  proper  attitude  of  any  rational 
man  to  his  country's  laws — a  secret  found,  and 
kept,  in  the  Asiatic  islands.  That  I  should 
commemorate  all  is  more  than  I  can  hope  or 
the  Editor  could  ask.  It  will  be  more  to  the 
point,  after  having  said  so  much  upon  improv- 
ing books,  to  say  a  word  or  two  about  the  im- 
provable reader.  The  gift  of  reading,  as  I  have 
called  it,  is  not  very  common,  nor  very  generally 
understood.  It  consists,  first  of  all,  in  a  vast 
intellectual  endowment — a  free  grace,  I  find  I 
must  call  it — by  which  a  man  rises  to  under- 
stand that  he  is  not  punctually  right,  nor 
those  from  whom  he  differs  absolutely  wrong. 
He  may  hold  dogmas;  he  may  hold  them  pas- 
sionately; and  he  may  know  that  others  hold 
them  but  coldly,  or  hold  them  differently,  or 
hold  them  not  at  all.  Well,  if  he  has  the  gift  of 
reading,  these  others  will  be  full  of  meat  for 
him.  They  will  see  the  other  side  of  proposi- 
tions and  the  other  side  of  virtues.  He  need  not 
change  his  dogma  for  that,  but  he  may  change 
his  reading  of  that  dogma,  and  he  must  supple- 
ment and  correct  his  deductions  from  it.  A 
human  truth,  which  is  always  very  much  a 
lie,  hides  as  much  of  life  as  it  displays.    It  is 


42  LEARNING  TO  WRITE 

men  who  hold  another  truth,  or,  as  it  seems  to 
us,  perhaps,  a  dangerous  lie,  who  can  extend 
our  restricted  field  of  knowledge,  and  rouse  our 
drowsy  consciences.  Something  that  seems 
quite  new,  or  that  seems  insolently  false  or 
very  dangerous,  is  the  test  of  a  reader.  If  he 
tries  to  see  what  it  means,  what  truth  excuses 
it,  he  has  the  gift,  and  let  him  read.  If  he  is 
merely  hurt,  or  offended,  or  exclaims  upon  his 
author's  folly,  he  had  better  take  to  the  daily 
papers;  he  will  never  be  a  reader. 

And  here,  with  the  aptest  illustrative  force, 
after  I  have  laid  down  my  part-truth,  I  must 
step  in  with  its  opposite.  For,  after  all,  we  are 
vessels  of  a  very  limited  content.  Not  all  men 
can  read  all  books;  it  is  only  in  a  chosen  few 
that  any  man  will  find  his  appointed  food;  and 
the  fittest  lessons  are  the  most  palatable,  and 
make  themselves  welcome  to  the  mind.  A 
writer  learns  this  early,  and  it  is  his  chief  sup- 
port; he  goes  on  unafraid,  laying  down  the  law; 
and  he  is  sure  at  heart  that  most  of  what  he 
says  is  demonstrably  false,  and  much  of  a 
mingled  strain,  and  some  hurtful,  and  very 
little  good  for  service;  but  he  is  sure  besides 
that  when  his  words  fall  into  the  hands  of  any 
genuine  reader,  they  will  be  weighed  and  win- 
nowed, and  only  that  which  suits  will  be  as- 


BOOKS  WHICH  INFLUENCED  ME    43 

similated;  and  when  they  fall  into  the  hands 
of  one  who  cannot  intelligently  read,  they  come 
there  quite  silent  and  inarticulate,  falling  upon 
deaf  ears,  and  his  secret  is  kept  as  if  he  had  not 
written. 


V 

A  GOSSIP  ON  ROMANCE 

In  anything  fit  to  be  called  by  the  name  of 
reading,  the  process  itself  should  be  absorbing 
and  voluptuous;  we  should  gloat  over  a  book, 
be  rapt  clean  out  of  ourselves,  and  rise  from  the 
perusal,  our  mind  filled  with  the  busiest,  ka- 
leidoscopic dance  of  images,  incapable  of  sleep 
or  of  continuous  thought.  The  words,  if  the 
book  be  eloquent,  should  run  thenceforward  in 
our  ears  like  the  noise  of  breakers,  and  the 
story,  if  it  be  a  story,  repeat  itself  in  a  thousand 
coloured  pictures  to  the  eye.  It  was  for  this 
last  pleasure  that  we  read  so  closely,  and  loved 
our  books  so  dearly,  in  the  bright,  troubled 
period  of  boyhood.  Eloquence  and  thought, 
character  and  conversation,  were  but  obstacles 
to  brush  aside  as  we  dug  blithely  after  a  cer- 
tain sort  of  incident,  like  a  pig  for  truffles. 
For  my  part,  I  liked  a  story  to  begin  with  an 
old  wayside  inn  where,  "towards  the  close  of 
the  year  17 — ,"  several  gentlemen  in  three- 
cocked  hats  were  playing  bowls.  A  friend  of 
mine  preferred  the  Malabar  coast  in  a  storm, 
with  a  ship  beating  to  windward,  and  a  scowling 
44 


A  GOSSIP  ON  ROMANCE  45 

fellow  of  Herculean  proportions  striding  along 
the  beach;  he,  to  be  sure,  was  a  pirate.  This 
was  further  afield  than  my  home-keeping  fancy 
loved  to  travel,  and  designed  altogether  for  a 
larger  canvas  than  the  tales  that  I  affected. 
Give  me  a  highwayman  and  I  was  full  to  the 
brim;  a  Jacobite  would  do,  but  the  highwayman 
was  my  favourite  dish.  I  can  still  hear  that 
merry  clatter  of  the  hoofs  along  the  moonlit 
lane;  night  and  the  coming  of  day  are  still  re- 
lated in  my  mind  with  the  doings  of  John  Rann 
or  Jerry  Abershaw;  and  the  words  "postchaise," 
the  "great  North  road,"  "ostler,"  and  "nag" 
still  sound  in  my  ears  like  poetry.  One  and  all, 
at  least,  and  each  with  his  particular  fancy,  we 
read  story-books  in  childhood,  not  for  eloquence 
or  character  or  thought,  but  for  some  quality 
of  the  brute  incident.  That  quality  was  not 
mere  bloodshed  or  wonder.  Although  each  of 
these  was  welcome  in  its  place,  the  charm  for  the 
sake  of  which  we  read  depended  on  something 
different  from  either.  My  elders  used  to  read 
novels  aloud;  and  I  can  still  remember  four 
different  passages  which  I  heard,  before  I  was 
ten,  with  the  same  keen  and  lasting  pleasure. 
One  I  discovered  long  afterwards  to  be  the  ad- 
mirable opening  of  What  will  he  Do  with  It:  it 
was  no  wonder  I  was  pleased  with  that.  The 
other  three  still  remain  unidentified.    One  is  a 


46  LEARNING  TO  WRITE 

little  vague;  it  was  about  a  dark,  tall  house  at 
night,  and  people  groping  on  the  stairs  by  the 
light  that  escaped  from  the  open  door  of  a 
sickroom.  In  another,  a  lover  left  a  ball,  and 
went  walking  in  a  cool,  dewy  park,  whence  he 
could  watch  the  lighted  windows  and  the  fig- 
ures of  the  dancers  as  they  moved.  This  was 
the  most  sentimental  impression  I  think  I  had 
yet  received,  for  a  child  is  somewhat  deaf  to 
the  sentimental.  In  the  last,  a  poet,  who  had 
been  tragically  wrangling  with  his  wife,  walked 
forth  on  the  sea-beach  on  a  tempestuous  night 
and  witnessed  the  horrors  of  a  wreck*  Dif- 
ferent as  they  are,  all  these  early  favourites  have 
a  common  note — they  have  all  a  touch  of  the 
romantic. 

Drama  is  the  poetry  of  conduct,  romance  the 
poetry  of  circumstance.  The  pleasure  that  we 
take  in  life  is  of  two  sorts — the  active  and  the 
passive.  Now  we  are  conscious  of  a  great 
command  over  our  destiny;  anon  we  are  lifted 
up  by  circumstance,  as  by  a  breaking  wave,  and 
dashed  we  know  not  how  into  the  future.  Now 
we  are  pleased  by  our  conduct,  anon  merely 
pleased  by  our  surroundings.  It  would  be 
hard  to  say  which  of  these  modes  of  satisfac- 
tion is  the  more  effective,  but  the  latter  is 

*  Since  traced  by  many  obliging  correspondents  to  the  gal- 
lery of  Charles  Kingsley. 


A  GOSSIP  ON  ROMANCE  47 

surely  the  more  constant.  Conduct  is  three 
parts  of  life,  they  say;  but  I  think  they  put  it 
high.  There  is  a  vast  deal  in  life  and  letters 
both  which  is  not  immoral,  but  simply  a-moral; 
which  either  does  not  regard  the  human  will  at 
all,  or  deals  with  it  in  obvious  and  healthy  re- 
lations; where  the  interest  turns,  not  upon 
what  a  man  shall  choose  to  do,  but  on  how  he 
manages  to  do  it;  not  on  the  passionate  slips 
and  hesitations  of  the  conscience,  but  on  the 
problems  of  the  body  and  of  the  practical  in- 
telligence, in  clean,  open-air  adventure,  the 
shock  of  arms  or  the  diplomacy  of  life.  With 
such  material  as  this  it  is  impossible  to  build  a 
play,  for  the  serious  theatre  exists  solely  on 
moral  grounds,  and  is  a  standing  proof  of  the 
dissemination  of  the  human  conscience.  But  it 
is  possible  to  build,  upon  this  ground,  the  most 
joyous  of  verses,  and  the  most  lively,  beautiful, 
and  buoyant  tales. 

One  thing  in  life  calls  for  another;  there  is  a 
fitness  in  events  and  places.  The  sight  of  a 
pleasant  arbour  puts  it  in  our  mind  to  sit 
there.  One  place  suggests  work,  another  idle- 
ness, a  third  early  rising  and  long  rambles  in 
the  dew.  The  effect  of  night,  of  any  flowing 
water,  of  lighted  cities,  of  the  peep  of  day,  of 
ships,  of  the  open  ocean,  calls  up  in  the  mind 
an  army  of  anonymous  desires  and  pleasures. 


48  LEARNING  TO  WRITE 

Something,  we  feel,  should  happen;  we  know 
not  what,  yet  we  proceed  in  quest  of  it.  And 
many  of  the  happiest  hours  of  life  fleet  by  us 
in  this  vain  attendance  on  the  genius  of  the 
place  and  moment.  It  is  thus  that  tracts  of 
young  fir,  and  low  rocks  that  reach  into  deep 
soundings,  particularly  torture  and  delight  me. 
Something  must  have  happened  in  such  places, 
and  perhaps  ages  back,  to  members  of  my  race; 
and  when  I  was  a  child  I  tried  in  vain  to  in- 
vent appropriate  games  for  them,  as  I  still 
try,  just  as  vainly,  to  fit  them  with  the  proper 
story.  Some  places  speak  distinctly.  Certain 
dank  gardens  cry  aloud  for  a  murder;  certain 
old  houses  demand  to  be  haunted;  certain 
coasts  are  set  apart  for  shipwreck.  Other  spots 
again  seem  to  abide  their  destiny,  suggestive 
and  impenetrable,  "miching  mallecho.,,  The 
inn  at  Burford  Bridge,  with  its  arbours  and  green 
garden  and  silent,  eddying  river — though  it  is 
known  already  as  the  place  where  Keats  wrote 
some  of  his  Endymion  and  Nelson  parted  from 
his  Emma — still  seems  to  wait  the  coming  of 
the  appropriate  legend.  Within  these  ivied 
walls,  behind  these  old  green  shutters,  some 
further  business  smoulders,  waiting  for  its  hour. 
The  old  Hawes  Inn  at  the  Queen's  Ferry  makes 
a  similar  call  upon  my  fancy.  There  it  stands, 
apart  from  the  town,  beside  the  pier,  in  a  cli- 


A  GOSSIP  ON  ROMANCE  49 

mate  of  its  own,  half  inland,  half  marine — in 
front,  the  ferry  bubbling  with  the  tide  and  the 
guardship  swinging  to  her  anchor;  behind,  the 
old  garden  with  the  trees.  Americans  seek  it 
already  for  the  sake  of  Lovel  and  Oldbuck,  who 
dined  there  at  the  beginning  of  the  Antiquary. 
But  you  need  not  tell  me — that  is  not  all; 
there  is  some  story,  unrecorded  or  not  yet 
complete,  which  must  express  the  meaning  of 
that  inn  more  fully.  So  it  is  with  names  and 
faces;  so  it  is  with  incidents  that  are  idle  and 
inconclusive  in  themselves,  and  yet  seem  like 
the  beginning  of  some  quaint  romance,  which 
the  all-careless  author  leaves  untold.  How 
many  of  these  romances  have  we  not  seen  de- 
termine at  their  birth;  how  many  people  have 
met  us  with  a  look  of  meaning  in  their  eye,  and 
sunk  at  once  into  trivial  acquaintances;  to  how 
many  places  have  we  not  drawn  near,  with 
express  intimations — "here  my  destiny  awaits 
me" — and  we  have  but  dined  there  and  passed 
on !  I  have  lived  both  at  the  Hawes  and  Bur- 
ford  in  a  perpetual  flutter,  on  the  heels,  as  it 
seemed,  of  some  adventure  that  should  justify 
the  place;  but  though  the  feeling  had  me  to 
bed  at  night  and  called  me  again  at  morning 
in  one  unbroken  round  of  pleasure  and  sus- 
pense, nothing  befell  me  in  either  worth  re- 
mark.   The  man  or  the  hour  had  not  yet  come; 


50  LEARNING  TO  WRITE 

but  some  day,  I  think,  a  boat  shall  put  off  from 
the  Queen's  Ferry,  fraught  with  a  dear  cargo, 
and  some  frosty  night  a  horseman,  on  a  tragic 
errand,  rattle  with  his  whip  upon  the  green 
shutters  of  the  inn  at  Burford.* 

Now,  this  is  one  of  the  natural  appetites  with 
which  any  lively  literature  has  to  count.  The 
desire  for  knowledge,  I  had  almost  added  the 
desire  for  meat,  is  not  more  deeply  seated  than 
this  demand  for  fit  and  striking  incident.  The 
dullest  of  clowns  tells,  or  tries  to  tell,  himself  a 
story,  as  the  feeblest  of  children  uses  invention 
in  his  play;  and  even  as  the  imaginative  grown 
person,  joining  in  the  game,  at  once  enriches  it 
with  many  delightful  circumstances,  the  great 
creative  writer  shows  us  the  realisation  and  the 
apotheosis  of  the  day-dreams  of  common  men. 
His  stories  may  be  nourished  with  the  realities 
of  life,  but  their  true  mark  is  to  satisfy  the 
nameless  longings  of  the  reader,  and  to  obey  the 
ideal  laws  of  the  day-dream.  The  right  kind 
of  thing  should  fall  out  in  the  right  kind  of 
place;  the  right  kind  of  thing  should  follow; 
and  not  only  the  characters  talk  aptly  and 
think  naturally,  but  all  the  circumstances  in  a 
tale  answer  one  to  another  like  notes  in  music. 

*  Since  the  above  was  written  I  have  tried  to  launch  the 
boat  with  my  own  hands  in  Kidnapped.  Some  day,  perhaps, 
I  may  try  a  rattle  at  the  shutters. 


A  GOSSIP  ON  ROMANCE  51 

The  threads  of  a  story  come  from  time  to  time 
together  and  make  a  picture  in  the  web;  the 
characters  fall  from  time  to  time  into  some  at- 
titude to  each  other  or  to  nature,  which  stamps 
the  story  home  like  an  illustration.  Crusoe 
recoiling  from  the  footprint,  Achilles  shouting 
over  against  the  Trojans,  Ulysses  bending  the 
great  bow,  Christian  running  with  his  fingers 
in  his  ears,  these  are  each  culminating  mo- 
ments in  the  legend,  and  each  has  been  printed 
on  the  mind's  eye  forever.  Other  things  we 
may  forget;  we  may  forget  the  words,  although 
they  are  beautiful;  we  may  forget  the  author's 
comment,  although  perhaps  it  was  ingenious 
and  true;  but  these  epoch-making  scenes,  which 
put  the  last  mark  of  truth  upon  a  story  and  fill 
up,  at  one  blow,  our  capacity  for  sympathetic 
pleasure,  we  so  adopt  into  the  very  bosom  of 
our  mind  that  neither  time  nor  tide  can  efface 
or  weaken  the  impression.  This,  then,  is  the 
plastic  part  of  literature:  to  embody  character, 
thought,  or  emotion  in  some  act  or  attitude 
that  shall  be  remarkably  striking  to  the  mind's 
eye.  This  is  the  highest  and  hardest  thing  to 
do  in  words;  the  thing  which,  once  accomplished, 
equally  delights  the  schoolboy  and  the  sage, 
and  makes,  in  its  own  right,  the  quality  of 
epics.  Compared  with  this,  all  other  purposes 
in  literature,  except  the  purely  lyrical  or  the 


52  LEARNING  TO  WRITE 

purely  philosophic,  are  bastard  in  nature, 
facile  of  execution,  and  feeble  in  result.  It  is 
one  thing  to  write  about  the  inn  at  Burford,  or 
to  describe  scenery  with  the  word-painters;  it 
is  quite  another  to  seize  on  the  heart  of  the 
suggestion  and  make  a  country  famous  with  a 
legend.  It  is  one  thing  to  remark  and  to  dis- 
sect, with  the  most  cutting  logic,  the  complica- 
tions of  life,  and  of  the  human  spirit;  it  is  quite 
another  to  give  them  body  and  blood  in  the 
story  of  Ajax  or  of  Hamlet.  The  first  is  litera- 
ture, but  the  second  is  something  besides,  for 
it  is  likewise  art. 

English  people  of  the  present  day*  are  apt,  I 
know  not  why,  to  look  somewhat  down  on  in- 
cident, and  reserve  their  admiration  for  the 
clink  of  teaspoons  and  the  accents  of  the  curate. 
It  is  thought  clever  to  write  a  novel  with  no 
story  at  all,  or  at  least  with  a  very  dull  one. 
Reduced  even  to  the  lowest  terms,  a  certain 
interest  can  be  communicated  by  the  art  of 
narrative;  a  sense  of  human  kinship  stirred; 
and  a  kind  of  monotonous  fitness,  comparable 
to  the  words  and  air  of  Sandy's  Mull,  pre- 
served among  the  infinitesimal  occurrences  re- 
corded. Some  people  work,  in  this  manner, 
with  even  a  strong  touch.  Mr.  Trollope's  in- 
imitable clergymen  naturally  arise  to  the  mind 
*  1882. 


A  GOSSIP  ON  ROMANCE  53 

in  this  connection.  But  even  Mr.  Trollope 
does  not  confine  himself  to  chronicling  small 
beer.  Mr.  Crawley's  collision  with  the  Bishop's 
wife,  Mr.  Melnette  dallying  in  the  deserted 
banquet-room,  are  typical  incidents,  epically 
conceived,  fitly  embodying  a  crisis.  Or  again 
look  at  Thackeray.  If  Rawdon  Crawley's  blow 
were  not  delivered,  Vanity  Fair  would  cease  to 
be  a  work  of  art.  That  scene  is  the  chief  gan- 
glion of  the  tale;  and  the  discharge  of  energy 
from  Rawdon's  fist  is  the  reward  and  consola- 
tion of  the  reader.  The  end  of  Esmond  is  a 
yet  wider  excursion  from  the  author's  custom- 
ary fields;  the  scene  at  Castlewood  is  pure  Du- 
mas; the  great  and  wily  English  borrower  has 
here  borrowed  from  the  great,  unblushing 
French  thief;  as  usual,  he  has  borrowed  admira- 
bly well,  and  the  breaking  of  the  sword  rounds 
off  the  best  of  all  his  books  with  a  manly,  mar- 
tial note.  But  perhaps  nothing  can  more 
strongly  illustrate  the  necessity  for  marking  in- 
cident than  to  compare  the  living  fame  of 
Robinson  Crusoe  with  the  discredit  of  Clarissa 
Harlowe.  Clarissa  is  a  book  of  a  far  more 
startling  import,  worked  out,  on  a  great  can- 
vas, with  inimitable  courage  and  unflagging 
art.  It  contains  wit,  character,  passion,  plot, 
conversations  full  of  spirit  and  insight,  letters 
sparkling  with  unstrained  humanity;  and  if  the 


54  LEARNING  TO  WRITE 

death  of  the  heroine  be  somewhat  frigid  and 
artificial,  the  last  days  of  the  hero  strike  the 
only  note  of  what  we  now  call  Byronism,  be- 
tween the  Elizabethans  and  Byron  himself. 
And  yet  a  little  story  of  a  shipwrecked  sailor, 
with  not  a  tenth  part  of  the  style  nor  a  thou- 
sandth part  of  the  wisdom,  exploring  none  of 
the  arcana  of  humanity  and  deprived  of  the 
perennial  interest  of  love,  goes  on  from  edition 
to  edition,  ever  young,  while  Clarissa  lies  upon 
the  shelves  unread.  A  friend  of  mine,  a  Welsh 
blacksmith,  was  twenty-five  years  old  and 
could  neither  read  nor  write,  when  he  heard  a 
chapter  of  Robinson  read  aloud  in  a  farm  kitchen. 
Up  to  that  moment  he  had  sat  content,  huddled 
in  his  ignorance,  but  he  left  that  farm  another 
man.  There  were  day-dreams,  it  appeared, 
divine  day-dreams,  written  and  printed  and 
bound,  and  to  be  bought  for  money  and  en- 
joyed at  pleasure.  Down  he  sat  that  day, 
painfully  learned  to  read  Welsh,  and  returned 
to  borrow  the  book.  It  had  been  lost,  nor 
could  he  find  another  copy  but  one  that  was  in 
English.  Down  he  sat  once  more,  learned  Eng- 
lish, and  at  length,  and  with  entire  delight,  read 
Robinson.  It  is  like  the  story  of  a  love-chase. 
If  he  had  heard  a  letter  from  Clarissa,  would  he 
have  been  fired  with  the  same  chivalrous  ar- 
dour?   I  wonder.    Yet  Clarissa  has  every  qual- 


A  GOSSIP  ON  ROMANCE  55 

ity  that  can  be  shown  in  prose,  one  alone  ex- 
cepted— pictorial  or  picture-making  romance. 
While  Robinson  depends,  for  the  most  part  and 
with  the  overwhelming  majority  of  its  readers, 
on  the  charm  of  circumstance. 

In  the  highest  achievements  of  the  art  of 
words,  the  dramatic  and  the  pictorial,  the  moral 
and  romantic  interest,  rise  and  fall  together  by 
a  common  and  organic  law.  Situation  is  ani- 
mated with  passion,  passion  clothed  upon  with 
situation.  Neither  exists  for  itself,  but  each 
inheres  indissolubly  with  the  other.  This  is 
high  art;  and  not  only  the  highest  art  possible 
in  words,  but  the  highest  art  of  all,  since  it 
combines  the  greatest  mass  and  diversity  of  the 
elements  of  truth  and  pleasure.  Such  are  epics, 
and  the  few  prose  tales  that  have  the  epic 
weight.  But  as  from  a  school  of  works,  aping 
the  creative,  incident  and  romance  are  ruth- 
lessly discarded,  so  may  character  and  drama 
be  omitted  or  subordinated  to  romance.  There 
is  one  book,  for  example,  more  generally  loved 
than  Shakespeare,  that  captivates  in  childhood, 
and  still  delights  in  age — I  mean  the  Arabian 
Nights — where  you  shall  look  in  vain  for 
moral  or  for  intellectual  interest.  No  human 
face  or  voice  greets  us  among  that  wooden 
crowd  of  kings  and  genies,  sorcerers  and  beggar- 
men.     Adventure,  on  the  most  naked  terms, 


56  LEARNING  TO  WRITE 

furnishes  forth  the  entertainment  and  is  found 
enough.  Dumas  approaches  perhaps  nearest  of 
any  modern  to  these  Arabian  authors  in  the 
purely  material  charm  of  some  of  his  romances. 
The  early  part  of  Monte  Cristo,  down  to  the 
finding  of  the  treasure,  is  a  piece  of  perfect 
story- telling;  the  man  never  breathed  who 
shared  these  moving  incidents  without  a  tremor; 
and  yet  Faria  is  a  thing  of  packthread  and 
D antes  little  more  than  a  name.  The  sequel  is 
one  long-drawn  error,  gloomy,  bloody,  unnatural 
and  dull;  but  as  for  these  early  chapters,  I  do 
not  believe  there  is  another  volume  extant 
where  you  can  breathe  the  same  unmingled  at- 
mosphere of  romance.  It  is  very  thin  and 
light,  to  be  sure,  as  on  a  high  mountain;  but 
it  is  brisk  and  clear  and  sunny  in  proportion. 
I  saw  the  other  day,  with  envy,  an  old  and  a 
very  clever  lady  setting  forth  on  a  second  or 
third  voyage  into  Monte  Cristo.  Here  are 
stories  which  powerfully  affect  the  reader,  which 
can  be  reperused  at  any  age,  and  where  the 
characters  are  no  more  than  puppets.  The 
bony  fist  of  the  showman  visibly  propels  them; 
their  springs  are  an  open  secret;  their  faces  are 
of  wood,  their  bellies  filled  with  bran;  and  yet 
we  thrillingly  partake  of  their  adventures.  And 
the  point  may  be  illustrated  still  further.  The 
last  interview  between  Lucy  and  Richard  Feverel 


A  GOSSIP  ON  ROMANCE  57 

is  pure  drama;  more  than  that,  it  is  the  strong- 
est scene,  since  Shakespeare,  in  the  English 
tongue.  Their  first  meeting  by  the  river,  on 
the  other  hand,  is  pure  romance;  it  has  nothing 
to  do  with  character;  it  might  happen  to  any- 
other  boy  and  maiden,  and  be  none  the  less  de- 
lightful for  the  change.  And  yet  I  think  he 
would  be  a  bold  man  who  should  choose  be- 
tween these  passages.  Thus,  in  the  same  book, 
we  may  have  two  scenes,  each  capital  in  its 
order:  in  the  one,  human  passion,  deep  calling 
unto  deep,  shall  utter  its  genuine  voice;  in  the 
second,  according  circumstances,  like  instru- 
ments in  tune,  shall  build  up  a  trivial  but  de- 
sirable incident,  such  as  we  love  to  prefigure  for 
ourselves;  and  in  the  end,  in  spite  of  the  critics, 
we  may  hesitate  to  give  the  preference  to  either. 
The  one  may  ask  more  genius — I  do  not  say  it 
does;  but  at  least  the  other  dwells  as  clearly  in 
the  memory. 

True  romantic  art,  again,  makes  a  romance 
of  all  things.  It  reaches  into  the  highest  ab- 
straction of  the  ideal;  it  does  not  refuse  the  most 
pedestrian  realism.  Robinson  Crusoe  is  as  real- 
istic as  it  is  romantic:  both  qualities  are  pushed 
to  an  extreme,  and  neither  suffers.  Nor  does 
romance  depend  upon  the  material  importance 
of  the  incidents.  To  deal  with  strong  and  deadly 
elements,  banditti,  pirates,  war  and  murder,  is 


58  LEARNING  TO  WRITE 

to  conjure  with  great  names,  and,  in  the  event 
of  failure,  to  double  the  disgrace.  The  arrival 
of  Haydn  and  Consuelo  at  the  Canon's  villa  is  a 
very  trifling  incident;  yet  we  may  read  a  dozen 
boisterous  stories  from  beginning  to  end,  and  not 
receive  so  fresh  and  stirring  an  impression  of 
adventure.  It  was  the  scene  of  Crusoe  at  the 
wreck,  if  I  remember  rightly,  that  so  bewitched 
my  blacksmith.  Nor  is  the  fact  surprising. 
Every  single  article  the  castaway  recovers  from 
the  hulk  is  "a  joy  for  ever"  to  the  man  who 
reads  of  them.  They  are  the  things  that  should 
be  found,  and  the  bare  enumeration  stirs  the 
blood.  I  found  a  glimmer  of  the  same  interest 
the  other  day  in  a  new  book,  The  Sailor's  Sweet- 
heart, by  Mr.  Clark  Russell.  The  whole  busi- 
ness of  the  brig  Morning  Star  is  very  rightly 
felt  and  spiritedly  written;  but  the  clothes,  the 
books  and  the  money  satisfy  the  reader's  mind 
like  things  to  eat.  We  are  dealing  here  with 
the  old  cut-and-dry,  legitimate  interest  of  treas- 
ure trove.  But  even  treasure  trove  can  be  made 
dull.  There  are  few  people  who  have  not 
groaned  under  the  plethora  of  goods  that  fell 
to  the  lot  of  the  Swiss  Family  Robinson,  that 
dreary  family.  They  found  article  after  article, 
creature  after  creature,  from  milk  kine  to  pieces 
of  ordnance,  a  whole  consignment;  but  no  in- 
forming taste  had  presided  over  the  selection, 


A  GOSSIP  ON  ROMANCE  59 

there  was  no  smack  or  relish  in  the  invoice;  and 
these  riches  left  the  fancy  cold.  The  box  of 
goods  in  Verne's  Mysterious  Island  is  another 
case  in  point:  there  was  no  gusto  and  no  glam- 
our about  that;  it  might  have  come  from  a  shop. 
But  the  two  hundred  and  seventy-eight  Aus- 
tralian sovereigns  on  board  the  Morning  Star 
fell  upon  me  like  a  surprise  that  I  had  expected; 
whole  vistas  of  secondary  stories,  besides  the 
one  in  hand,  radiated  forth  from  that  discov- 
ery, as  they  radiate  from  a  striking  particular 
in  life;  and  I  was  made  for  the  moment  as  happy 
as  a  reader  has  the  right  to  be. 

To  come  at  all  at  the  nature  of  this  quality 
of  romance,  we  must  bear  in  mind  the  peculiar- 
ity of  our  attitude  to  any  art.  No  art  pro- 
duces illusion;  in  the  theatre  we  never  forget 
that  we  are  in  the  theatre;  and  while  we  read 
a  story,  we  sit  wavering  between  two  minds, 
now  merely  clapping  our  hands  at  the  merit  of 
the  performance,  now  condescending  to  take 
an  active  part  in  fancy  with  the  characters. 
This  last  is  the  triumph  of  romantic  story- 
telling: when  the  reader  consciously  plays  at 
being  the  hero,  the  scene  is  a  good  scene.  Now 
in  character-studies  the  pleasure  that  we  take 
is  critical;  we  watch,  we  approve,  we  smile  at 
incongruities,  we  are  moved  to  sudden  heats  of 
sympathy   with   courage,   suffering   or  virtue. 


60  LEARNING  TO  WRITE 

But  the  characters  are  still  themselves,  they  are 
not  us;  the  more  clearly  they  are  depicted,  the 
more  widely  do  they  stand  away  from  us,  the 
more  imperiously  do  they  thrust  us  back  into 
our  place  as  a  spectator.  I  cannot  identify 
myself  with  Rawdon  Crawley  or  with  Eugene 
de  Rastignac,  for  I  have  scarce  a  hope  or  fear 
in  common  with  them.  It  is  not  character  but 
incident  that  woos  us  out  of  our  reserve.  Some- 
thing happens  as  we  desire  to  have  it  happen  to 
ourselves;  some  situation,  that  we  have  long 
dallied  with  in  fancy,  is  realised  in  the  story 
with  enticing  and  appropriate  details.  Then 
we  forget  the  characters;  then  we  push  the  hero 
aside;  then  we  plunge  into  the  tale  in  our  own 
person  and  bathe  in  fresh  experience;  and  then, 
and  then  only,  do  we  say  we  have  been  reading 
a  romance.  It  is  not  only  pleasurable  things 
that  we  imagine  in  our  day-dreams;  there  are 
lights  in  which  we  are  willing  to  contemplate 
even  the  idea  of  our  own  death;  ways  in 
which  it  seems  as  if  it  would  amuse  us  to  be 
cheated,  wounded  or  calumniated.  It  is  thus 
possible  to  construct  a  story,  even  of  tragic  im- 
port, in  which  every  incident,  detail  and  trick 
of  circumstance  shall  be  welcome  to  the  read- 
er's thoughts.  Fiction  is  to  the  grown  man 
what  play  is  to  the  child;  it  is  there  that  he 
changes  the  atmosphere  and  tenor  of  his  life; 


A  GOSSIP  ON  ROMANCE  61 

and  when  the  game  so  chimes  with  his  fancy 
that  he  can  join  in  it  with  all  his  heart,  when  it 
pleases  him  with  every  turn,  when  he  loves  to 
recall  it  and  dwells  upon  its  recollection  with 
entire  delight,  fiction  is  called  romance. 

Walter  Scott  is  out  and  away  the  king  of  the 
romantics.  The  Lady  of  the  Lake  has  no  indis- 
putable claim  to  be  a  poem  beyond  the  inherent 
fitness  and  desirability  of  the  tale.  It  is  just 
such  a  story  as  a  man  would  make  up  for  him- 
self, walking,  in  the  best  health  and  temper, 
through  just  such  scenes  as  it  is  laid  in.  Hence 
it  is  that  a  charm  dwells  undefinable  among 
these  slovenly  verses,  as  the  unseen  cuckoo  fills 
the  mountains  with  his  note;  hence,  even  after 
we  have  flung  the  book  aside,  the  scenery  and 
adventures  remain  present  to  the  mind,  a  new 
and  green  possession,  not  unworthy  of  that 
beautiful  name,  The  Lady  of  the  Lake,  or  that 
direct,  romantic  opening, — one  of  the  most 
spirited  and  poetical  in  literature, — "The  stag 
at  eve  had  drunk  his  fill."  The  same  strength 
and  the  same  weaknesses  adorn  and  disfigure 
the  novels.  In  that  ill-written,  ragged  book, 
The  Pirate,  the  figure  of  Cleveland — cast  up  by 
the  sea  on  the  resounding  foreland  of  Dunross- 
ness — moving,  with  the  blood  on  his  hands  and 
the  Spanish  words  on  his  tongue,  among  the 
simple  islanders — singing  a  serenade  under  the 


62  LEARNING  TO  WRITE 

window  of  his  Shetland  mistress — is  conceived 
in  the  very  highest  manner  of  romantic  inven- 
tion. The  words  of  his  song,  "Through  groves 
of  palm,"  sung  in  such  a  scene  and  by  such  a 
lover,  clench,  as  in  a  nutshell,  the  emphatic 
contrast  upon  which  the  tale  is  built.  In  Guy 
Mannering,  again,  every  incident  is  delightful 
to  the  imagination;  and  the  scene  when  Harry 
Bertram  lands  at  Ellangowan  is  a  model  in- 
stance of  romantic  method. 

"  'I  remember  the  tune  well,'  he  says,  'though 
I  cannot  guess  what  should  at  present  so  strongly 
recall  it  to  my  memory.'  He  took  his  flageolet 
from  his  pocket  and  played  a  simple  melody. 
Apparently  the  tune  awoke  the  corresponding 
associations  of  a  damsel.  .  .  .  She  immediately 
took  up  the  song — 

"  'Are  these  the  links  of  Forth,  she  said; 
Or  are  they  the  crooks  of  Dee, 
Or  the  bonny  woods  of  Warroch  Head 
That  I  so  fain  would  see?' 

"  'By  heaven!'  said  Bertram,  'it  is  the  very 
ballad.' " 

On  this  quotation  two  remarks  fall  to  be 
made.  First,  as  an  instance  of  modern  feeling 
for  romance,  this  famous  touch  of  the  flageolet 
and  the  old  song  is  selected  by  Miss  Braddon 
for  omission.    Miss  Braddon's  idea  of  a  story, 


A  GOSSIP  ON  ROMANCE  63 

like  Mrs.  Todgers's  idea  of  a  wooden  leg,  were 
something  strange  to  have  expounded.  As  a 
matter  of  personal  experience,  Meg's  appear- 
ance to  old  Mr.  Bertram  on  the  road,  the  ruins 
of  Derncleugh,  the  scene  of  the  flageolet,  and 
the  Dominie's  recognition  of  Harry,  are  the 
four  strong  notes  that  continue  to  ring  in  the 
mind  after  the  book  is  laid  aside.  The  second 
point  is  still  more  curious.  The  reader  will 
observe  a  mark  of  excision  in  the  passage  as 
quoted  by  me.  Well,  here  is  how  it  runs  in  the 
original:  "a  damsel,  who,  close  behind  a  fine 
spring  about  half-way  down  the  descent,  and 
which  had  once  supplied  the  castle  with  water, 
was  engaged  in  bleaching  linen."  A  man  who 
gave  in  such  copy  would  be  discharged  from  the 
staff  of  a  daily  paper.  Scott  has  forgotten  to 
prepare  the  reader  for  the  presence  of  the 
" damsel";  he  has  forgotten  to  mention  the 
spring  and  its  relation  to  the  ruin;  and  now, 
face  to  face  with  his  omission,  instead  of  trying 
back  and  starting  fair,  crams  all  this  matter, 
tail  foremost,  into  a  single  shambling  sentence. 
It  is  not  merely  bad  English,  or  bad  style;  it  is 
abominably  bad  narrative  besides. 

Certainly  the  contrast  is  remarkable;  and  it 
is  one  that  throws  a  strong  light  upon  the  sub- 
ject of  this  paper.  For  here  we  have  a  man  of 
the  finest  creative  instinct  touching  with  perfect 


64  LEARNING  TO  WRITE 

certainty  and  charm  the  romantic  junctures  of 
his  story;  and  we  find  him  utterly  careless, 
almost,  it  would  seem,  incapable,  in  the  tech- 
nical matter  of  style,  and  not  only  frequently 
weak,  but  frequently  wrong  in  points  of  drama. 
In  character  parts,  indeed,  and  particularly  in 
the  Scotch,  he  was  delicate,  strong  and  truthful; 
but  the  trite,  obliterated  features  of  too  many 
of  his  heroes  have  already  wearied  two  genera- 
tions of  readers.  At  times  his  characters  will 
speak  with  something  far  beyond  propriety 
with  a  true  heroic  note;  but  on  the  next  page 
they  will  be  wading  wearily  forward  with  an 
ungrammatical  and  undramatic  rigmarole  of 
words.  The  man  who  could  conceive  and 
write  the  character  of  Elspeth  of  the  Craig- 
burnfoot,  as  Scott  has  conceived  and  written 
it,  had  not  only  splendid  romantic,  but  splen- 
did tragic  gifts.  How  comes  it,  then,  that  he 
could  so  often  fob  us  off  with  languid,  inar- 
ticulate twaddle? 

It  seems  to  me  that  the  explanation  is  to  be 
found  in  the  very  quality  of  his  surprising 
merits.  As  his  books  are  play  to  the  reader, 
so  were  they  play  to  him.  He  conjured  up  the 
romantic  with  delight,  but  he  had  hardly 
patience  to  describe  it.  He  was  a  great  day- 
dreamer,  a  seer  of  fit  and  beautiful  and  humor- 
ous visions,  but  hardly  a  great  artist;  hardly, 


A  GOSSIP  ON  ROMANCE  65 

in  the  manful  sense,  an  artist  at  all.  He  pleased 
himself,  and  so  he  pleases  us.  Of  the  pleasures 
of  his  art  he  tasted  fully;  but  of  its  toils  and 
vigils  and  distresses  never  man  knew  less.  A 
great  romantic — an  idle  child. 


VI 

THE  CRAFT  IN  TELLING  A  STORY 

From  "A  Bumble  Remonstrance" 

Whether  a  narrative  be  written  in  blank 
verse  or  the  Spenserian  stanza,  in  the  long 
period  of  Gibbon  or  the  chipped  phrase  of 
Charles  Reade,  the  principles  of  the  art  of 
narrative  must  be  equally  observed.  The  choice 
of  a  noble  and  swelling  style  in  prose  affects 
the  problem  of  narration  in  the  same  way,  if 
not  to  the  same  degree,  as  the  choice  of  mea- 
sured verse;  for  both  imply  a  closer  synthesis  of 
events,  a  higher  key  of  dialogue,  and  a  more 
picked  and  stately  strain  of  words. 

The  art  of  narrative,  in  fact,  is  the  same, 
whether  it  is  applied  to  the  selection  and  illus- 
tration of  a  real  series  of  events  or  of  an  imag- 
inary series.  Boswell's  Life  of  Johnson  (a  work 
of  cunning  and  inimitable  art)  owes  its  success 
to  the  same  technical  manoeuvres  as  (let  us 
say)  Tom  Jones:  the  clear  conception  of  cer- 
tain characters  of  man,  the  choice  and  presen- 
tation of  certain  incidents  out  of  a  great  num- 
ber that  offered,  and  the  invention  (yes  inven- 

66 


TELLING  A  STORY  67 

tion)  and  preservation  of  a  certain  key  in 
dialogue.  In  which  these  things  are  done  with 
the  more  art — in  which  with  the  greater  air  of 
nature — readers  will  differently  judge.  Bos- 
welPs  is,  indeed,  a  very  special  case,  and  al- 
most a  generic;  but  it  is  not  only  in  Boswell,  it 
is  in  every  biography  with  any  salt  of  life,  it  is 
in  every  history  where  events  and  men,  rather 
than  ideas,  are  presented — in  Tacitus,  in  Car- 
lyle,  in  Michelet,  in  Macaulay — that  the  novel- 
ist will  find  many  of  his  own  methods  most 
conspicuously  and  adroitly  handled.  He  will 
find  besides  that  he,  who  is  free — who  has  the 
right  to  invent  or  steal  a  missing  incident,  who 
has  the  right,  more  precious  still,  of  wholesale 
omission — is  frequently  defeated,  and,  with  all 
his  advantages,  leaves  a  less  strong  impression 
of  reality  and  passion. 

What,  then,  is  the  object,  what  the  method, 
of  an  art,  and  what  the  source  of  its  power? 
The  whole  secret  is  that  no  art  does  "  compete 
with  life."  Man's  one  method,  whether  he 
reasons  or  creates,  is  to  half-shut  his  eyes 
against  the  dazzle  and  confusion  of  reality. 
The  arts,  like  arithmetic  and  geometry,  turn 
away  their  eyes  from  the  gross,  coloured  and 
mobile  nature  at  our  feet,  and  regard  instead  a 
certain  figmentary  abstraction.  Geometry  will 
tell  us  of  a  circle,  a  thing  never  seen  in  nature; 


68  LEARNING  TO  WRITE 

asked  about  a  green  circle  or  an  iron  circle,  it 
lays  its  hand  upon  its  mouth.  So  with  the  arts. 
Painting,  ruefully  comparing  sunshine  and  flake- 
white,  gives  up  truth  of  colour,  as  it  had  al- 
ready given  up  relief  and  movement;  and  in- 
stead of  vying  with  nature,  arranges  a  scheme 
of  harmonious  tints.  Literature,  above  all  in 
its  most  typical  mood,  the  mood  of  narrative, 
similarly  flees  the  direct  challenge  and  pursues 
instead  an  independent  and  creative  aim.  So 
far  as  it  imitates  at  all,  it  imitates  not  life  but 
speech:  not  the  facts  of  human  destiny,  but  the 
emphasis  and  the  suppressions  with  which  the 
human  actor  tells  of  them.  The  real  art  that 
dealt  with  life  directly  was  that  of  the  first  men 
who  told  their  stories  round  the  savage  camp- 
fire.  Our  art  is  occupied,  and  bound  to  be  oc- 
cupied, not  so  much  in  making  stories  true  as 
in  making  them  typical;  not  so  much  in  captur- 
ing the  lineaments  of  each  fact,  as  in  marshalling 
all  of  them  towards  a  common  end.  For  the 
welter  of  impressions,  all  forcible  but  all  dis- 
creet, which  life  presents,  it  substitutes  a  cer- 
tain artificial  series  of  impressions,  all  indeed 
most  feebly  represented,  but  all  aiming  at  the 
same  effect,  all  eloquent  of  the  same  idea,  all 
chiming  together  like  consonant  notes  in  music 
or  like  the  graduated  tints  in  a  good  picture. 
From  all  its  chapters,  from  all  its  pages,  from 


TELLING  A  STORY  69 

all  its  sentences,  the  well-written  novel  echoes 
and  re-echoes  its  one  creative  and  controlling 
thought;  to  this  must  every  incident  and  char- 
acter contribute;  the  style  must  have  been 
pitched  in  unison  with  this;  and  if  there  is  any- 
where a  word  that  looks  another  way,  the  book 
would  be  stronger,  clearer,  and  (I  had  almost 
said)  fuller  without  it.  Life  is  monstrous,  in- 
finite, illogical,  abrupt  and  poignant;  a  work 
of  art,  in  comparison,  is  neat,  finite,  self-con- 
tained, rational,  flowing  and  emasculate.  Life 
imposes  by  brute  energy,  like  inarticulate 
thunder;  art  catches  the  ear,  among  the  far 
louder  noises  of  experience,  like  an  air  artificially 
made  by  a  discreet  musician.  A  proposition  of 
geometry  does  not  compete  with  life;  and  a 
proposition  of  geometry  is  a  fair  and  luminous 
parallel  for  a  work  of  art.  Both  are  reasonable, 
both  untrue  to  the  crude  fact;  both  inhere  in 
nature,  neither  represents  it.  The  novel, 
which  is  a  work  of  art,  exists,  not  by  its  re- 
semblances to  life,  which  are  forced  and  ma- 
terial, as  a  shoe  must  still  consist  of  leather, 
but  by  its  immeasurable  difference  from  life, 
which  is  designed  and  significant,  and  is  both 
the  method  and  the  meaning  of  the  work. 

The  life  of  man  is  not  the  subject  of  novels, 
but  the  inexhaustible  magazine  from  which 
subjects  are  to  be  selected;  the  name  of  these 


70  LEARNING  TO  WRITE 

is  legion;  and  with  each  new  subject  the  true 
artist  will  vary  his  method  and  change  the 
point  of  attack.  That  which  was  in  one  case 
an  excellence,  will  become  a  defect  in  another; 
what  was  the  making  of  one  book,  will  in  the 
next  be  impertinent  or  dull.  First  each  novel, 
and  then  each  class  of  novels,  exists  by  and  for 
itself.  I  will  take,  for  instance,  three  main 
classes,  which  are  fairly  distinct:  first,  the  novel 
of  adventure,  which  appeals  to  certain  almost 
sensual  and  quite  illogical  tendencies  in  man; 
second,  the  novel  of  character,  which  appeals 
to  our  intellectual  appreciation  of  man's  foibles 
and  mingled  and  inconstant  motives;  and  third, 
the  dramatic  novel,  which  deals  with  the  same 
stuff  as  the  serious  theatre,  and  appeals  to  our 
emotional  nature  and  moral  judgment. 

And  first  for  the  novel  of  adventure.  The 
luxury,  to  most  of  us,  is  to  lay  by  our  judg- 
ment, to  be  submerged  by  the  tale  as  by  a  bil- 
low, and  only  to  awake,  and  begin  to  distin- 
guish and  find  fault,  when  the  piece  is  over  and 
the  volume  laid  aside.  There  never  was  a 
child  but  has  hunted  gold,  and  been  a  pirate, 
and  a  military  commander,  and  a  bandit  of  the 
mountains;  but  has  fought,  and  suffered  ship- 
wreck and  prison,  and  imbrued  its  little  hands 
in  gore,  and  gallantly  retrieved  the  lost  battle, 
and    triumphantly    protected    innocence    and 


TELLING  A  STORY  71 

beauty.  Desire  is  a  wonderful  telescope,  and 
Pisgah  the  best  observatory.  Now,  while  it  is 
true  that  the  author  of  the  work  in  question 
has  never,  in  the  fleshly  sense,  gone  questing 
after  gold,  it  is  probable  that  he  has  ardently 
desired  and  fondly  imagined  the  details  of  such 
a  life  in  youthful  day-dreams;  and  the  author, 
counting  upon  that,  and  well  aware  (cunning 
and  low-minded  man!)  that  this  class  of  in- 
terest, having  been  frequently  treated,  finds  a 
readily  accessible  and  beaten  road  to  the  sym- 
pathies of  the  reader,  addressed  himself  through- 
out to  the  building  up  and  circumstantiation  of 
this  boyish  dream.  Character  to  the  boy  is  a 
sealed  book;  for  him,  a  pirate  is  a  beard,  a  pair 
of  wide  trousers  and  a  liberal  complement  of 
pistols.  The  author,  for  the  sake  of  circum- 
stantiation and  because  he  was  himself  more  or 
less  grown  up,  admitted  character,  within  cer- 
tain limits,  into  his  design;  but  only  within  cer- 
tain limits.  Had  the  same  puppets  figured  in  a 
scheme  of  another  sort,  they  had  been  drawn 
to  very  different  purpose;  for  in  this  elementary 
novel  of  adventure,  the  characters  need  to  be 
presented  with  but  one  class  of  qualities — the 
warlike  and  formidable.  So  as  they  appear 
insidious  in  deceit  and  fatal  in  the  combat,  they 
have  served  their  end.  Danger  is  the  matter 
with  which  this  class  of  novel  deals;  fear,  the 


72  LEARNING  TO  WRITE 

passion  with  which  it  idly  trifles;  and  the  char- 
acters are  portrayed  only  so  far  as  they  realise 
the  sense  of  danger  and  provoke  the  sympathy 
of  fear.  To  add  more  traits,  to  be  too  clever, 
to  start  the  hare  of  moral  or  intellectual  inter- 
est while  we  are  running  the  fox  of  material 
interest,  is  not  to  enrich  but  to  stultify  your 
tale.  The  stupid  reader  will  only  be  offended, 
and  the  clever  reader  lose  the  scent. 

The  novel  of  character  has  this  difference 
from  all  others:  that  it  requires  no  coherency 
of  plot,  and  for  this  reason,  as  in  the  case  of 
Gil  Bias,  it  is  sometimes  called  the  novel  of 
adventure.  It  turns  on  the  humours  of  the 
persons  represented;  these  are,  to  be  sure,  em- 
bodied in  incidents,  but  the  incidents  them- 
selves, being  tributary,  need  not  march  in  a 
progression;  and  the  characters  may  be  stati- 
cally shown.  As  they  enter,  so  they  may  go 
out;  they  must  be  consistent,  but  they  need  not 
grow.  Here  Mr.  James  *  will  recognise  the  note 
of  much  of  his  own  work:  he  treats,  for  the 
most  part,  the  statics  of  character,  studying  it 
at  rest  or  only  gently  moved;  and,  with  his 
usual  delicate  and  just  artistic  instinct,  he 
avoids  those  stronger  passions  which  would  de- 
form the  attitudes  he  loves  to  study,  and  change 
his  sitters  from  the  humourists  of  ordinary  life 
*  Henry  James,  the  novelist. 


TELLING  A  STORY  73 

to  the  brute  forces  and  bare  types  of  more 
emotional  moments.  In  his  recent  Author  of 
BeltraffiOy  so  just  in  conception,  so  nimble  and 
neat  in  workmanship,  strong  passion  is  indeed 
employed;  but  observe  that  it  is  not  displayed. 
Even  in  the  heroine  the  working  of  the  passion 
is  suppressed;  and  the  great  struggle,  the  true 
tragedy,  the  scene-drfaire,  passes  unseen  be- 
hind the  panels  of  a  locked  door.  The  delec- 
table invention  of  the  young  visitor  is  intro- 
duced, consciously  or  not,  to  this  end:  that  Mr. 
James,  true  to  his  method,  might  avoid  the 
scene  of  passion.  I  trust  no  reader  will  suppose 
me  guilty  of  undervaluing  this  little  master- 
piece. I  mean  merely  that  it  belongs  to  one 
marked  class  of  novel,  and  that  it  would  have 
been  very  differently  conceived  and  treated 
had  it  belonged  to  that  other  marked  class,  of 
which  I  now  proceed  to  speak. 

I  take  pleasure  in  calling  the  dramatic  novel 
by  that  name,  because  it  enables  me  to  point 
out  by  the  way  a  strange  and  peculiarly  Eng- 
lish misconception.  It  is  sometimes  supposed 
that  the  drama  consists  of  incident.  It  con- 
sists of  passion,  which  gives  the  actor  his  op- 
portunity; and  that  passion  must  progressively 
increase,  or  the  actor,  as  the  piece  proceeded, 
would  be  unable  to  carry  the  audience  from  a 
lower  to  a  higher  pitch  of  interest  and  emotion. 


74  LEARNING  TO  WRITE 

A  good  serious  play  must  therefore  be  founded 
on  one  of  the  passionate  cruces  of  life,  where 
duty  and  inclination  come  nobly  to  the  grapple; 
and  the  same  is  true  of  what  I  call,  for  that 
reason,  the  dramatic  novel.  I  will  instance  a 
few  worthy  specimens,  all  of  our  own  day  and 
language:  Meredith's  Rhoda  Fleming,  that  won- 
derful and  painful  book,  long  out  of  print,* 
and  hunted  for  at  book-stalls  like  an  Aldine; 
Hardy's  Pair  of  Blue  Eyes;  and  two  of  Charles 
Reade's,  Griffith  Gaunt  and  The  Double  Marriage, 
originally  called  White  Lies,  and  founded  (by 
an  accident  quaintly  favourable  to  my  nomen- 
clature) on  a  play  by  Maquet,  the  partner  of 
the  great  Dumas.  In  this  kind  of  novel  the 
closed  door  of  The  Author  of  Beltrqffio  must  be 
broken  open;  passion  must  appear  upon  the 
scene  and  utter  its  last  word;  passion  is  the 
be-all  and  the  end-all,  the  plot  and  the  solu- 
tion, the  protagonist  and  the  deus  ex  machina 
in  one.  The  characters  may  come  anyhow 
upon  the  stage:  we  do  not  care;  the  point  is, 
that,  before  they  leave  it,  they  shall  become 
transfigured  and  raised  out  of  themselves  by 
passion.  It  may  be  part  of  the  design  to  draw 
them  with  detail;  to  depict  a  full-length  char- 
acter, and  then  behold  it  melt  and  change  in 
the  furnace  of  emotion.  But  there  is  no  obliga- 
*  Now  no  longer  so,  thank  heaven ! 


TELLING  A  STORY  75 

tion  of  the  sort;  nice  portraiture  is  not  required; 
and  we  are  content  to  accept  mere  abstract 
types,  so  they  be  strongly  and  sincerely  moved. 
A  novel  of  this  class  may  be  even  great,  and 
yet  contain  no  individual  figure;  it  may  be 
great,  because  it  displays  the  workings  of  the 
perturbed  heart  and  the  impersonal  utterance 
of  passion;  and  with  an  artist  of  the  second 
class  it  is,  indeed,  even  more  likely  to  be  great, 
when  the  issue  has  thus  been  narrowed  and  the 
whole  force  of  the  writer's  mind  directed  to 
passion  alone.  Cleverness  again,  which  has  its 
fair  field  in  the  novel  of  character,  is  debarred 
all  entry  upon  this  more  solemn  theatre.  A 
far-fetched  motive,  an  ingenious  evasion  of  the 
issue,  a  witty  instead  of  a  passionate  turn, 
offend  us  like  an  insincerity.  All  should  be 
plain,  all  straightforward  to  the  end.  Hence 
it  is  that,  in  Rhoda  Fleming,  Mrs.  Lovel  raises 
such  resentment  in  the  reader;  her  motives  are 
too  flimsy,  her  ways  are  too  equivocal,  for  the 
weight  and  strength  of  her  surroundings. 
Hence  the  hot  indignation  of  the  reader  when 
Balzac,  after  having  begun  the  Duchesse  de 
Langeais  in  terms  of  strong  if  somewhat  swollen 
passion,  cuts  the  knot  by  the  derangement  of 
the  hero's  clock.  Such  personages  and  inci- 
dents belong  to  the  novel  of  character;  they 
are  out  of  place  in  the  high  society  of  the  pas- 


76  LEARNING  TO  WRITE 

sions;  when  the  passions  are  introduced  in  art 
at  their  full  height,  we  look  to  see  them,  not 
baffled  and  impotently  striving,  as  in  life,  but 
towering  above  circumstance  and  acting  sub- 
stitutes for  fate. 

But  the  point  is  not  merely  to  amuse  the 
public,  but  to  offer  helpful  advice  to  the  young 
writer.  And  the  young  writer  will  not  so  much 
be  helped  by  genial  pictures  of  what  an  art  may 
aspire  to  at  its  highest,  as  by  a  true  idea  of 
what  it  must  be  on  the  lowest  terms.  The 
best  that  we  can  say  to  him  is  this:  Let  him 
choose  a  motive,  whether  of  character  or  pas- 
sion; carefully  construct  his  plot  so  that  every 
incident  is  an  illustration  of  the  motive,  and 
every  property  employed  shall  bear  to  it  a 
near  relation  of  congruity  or  contrast;  avoid  a 
sub-plot,  unless,  as  sometimes  in  Shakespeare, 
the  sub-plot  be  a  reversion  or  complement  of 
the  main  intrigue;  suffer  not  his  style  to  flag 
below  the  level  of  the  argument;  pitch  the  key 
of  conversation,  not  with  any  thought  of  how 
men  talk  in  parlours,  but  with  a  single  eye  to 
the  degree  of  passion  he  may  be  called  on  to 
express;  and  allow  neither  himself  in  the  nar- 
rative nor  any  character  in  the  course  of  the 
dialogue,  to  utter  one  sentence  that  is  not  part 
and  parcel  of  the  business  of  the  story  or  the 
discussion  of  the  problem  involved.     Let  him 


TELLING  A  STORY  77 

not  regret  if  this  shortens  his  book;  it  will  be 
better  so;  for  to  add  irrelevant  matter  is  not  to 
lengthen  but  to  bury.  Let  him  not  mind  if  he 
miss  a  thousand  qualities,  so  that  he  keeps  un- 
flaggingly  in  pursuit  of  the  one  he  has  chosen. 
Let  him  not  care  particularly  if  he  miss  the 
tone  of  conversation,  the  pungent  material  de- 
tail of  the  day's  manners,  the  reproduction  of 
the  atmosphere  and  the  environment.  These 
elements  are  not  essential:  a  novel  may  be 
excellent,  and  yet  have  none  of  them;  a  passion 
or  a  character  is  so  much  the  better  depicted  as 
it  rises  clearer  from  material  circumstance.  In 
this  age  of  the  particular,  let  him  remember  the 
ages  of  the  abstract,  the  great  books  of  the  past, 
the  brave  men  that  lived  before  Shakespeare 
and  before  Balzac.  And  as  the  root  of  the 
whole  matter,  let  him  bear  in  mind  that  his 
novel  is  not  a  transcript  of  life,  to  be  judged  by 
its  exactitude;  but  a  simplification  of  some  side 
or  point  of  life,  to  stand  or  fall  by  its  significant 
simplicity.  For  although,  in  great  men,  work- 
ing upon  great  motives,  what  we  observe  and 
admire  is  often  their  complexity,  yet  under- 
neath appearances  the  truth  remains  unchanged: 
that  simplification  was  their  method,  and  that 
simplicity  is  their  excellence. 


VII 
MISCELLANEOUS  OBSERVATIONS 

I 
Notes  for  the  Student  of  Any  Art 

i.  Keep  an  intelligent  eye  upon  all  the  others. 
It  is  only  by  doing  so  that  you  come  to  see  what 
Art  is:  Art  is  the  end  common  to  them  all,  it 
is  none  of  the  points  by  which  they  differ. 

2.  In  this  age  beware  of  realism. 

3.  In  your  own  art,  bow  your  head  over  tech- 
nique. Think  of  technique  when  you  rise  and 
when  you  go  to  bed.  Forget  purposes  in  the 
meanwhile;  get  to  love  technical  processes;  to 
glory  in  technical  successes;  get  to  see  the  world 
entirely  through  technical  spectacles,  to  see  it 
entirely  in  terms  of  what  you  can  do.  Then 
when  you  have  anything  to  say,  the  language 
will  be  apt  and  copious. 

4.  See  the  good  in  other  people's  work;  it 
will  never  be  yours.  See  the  bad  in  your  own, 
and  don't  cry  about  it;  it  will  be  there  always. 
Try  to  use  your  faults;  at  any  rate  use  your 
knowledge  of  them,  and  don't  run  your  head 
against  stone  walls.    Art  is  not  like  theology; 

78 


OBSERVATIONS  79 

nothing  is  forced.  You  have  not  to  represent 
the  world.  You  have  to  represent  only  what 
you  can  represent  with  pleasure  and  effect, 
and  the  only  way  to  find  out  what  that  is  is 
by  technical  exercise. 

— Letter  to  Trevor  Haddon. 


Craftsmanship  in  Literature 

Seriously,  from  the  dearth  of  information 
and  thoughtful  interest  in  the  art  of  literature, 
those  who  try  to  practise  it  with  any  deliberate 
purpose  run  the  risk  of  finding  no  fit  audience. 
People  suppose  it  is  "the  stuff"  that  interests 
them;  they  think,  for  instance,  that  the 
prodigious  fine  thoughts  and  sentiments  in 
Shakespeare  impress  by  their  own  weight,  not 
understanding  that  the  unpolished  diamond  is 
but  a  stone.  They  think  that  striking  situa- 
tions, or  good  dialogue,  are  got  by  studying 
life;  they  will  not  rise  to  understand  that  they 
are  prepared  by  deliberate  artifice  and  set  off 
by  painful  suppressions. 

— Letter  to  Henry  James. 

Tms  purely  artistic  society  is  excellent  for 
the  young  artist.  The  lads  are  mostly  fools; 
they  hold  the  latest  orthodoxy  in  its  crudeness; 


So  LEARNING  TO  WRITE 

they  are  at  that  stage  of  education,  for  the  most 
part,  when  a  man  is  too  much  occupied  with 
style  to  be  aware  of  the  necessity  for  any  mat- 
ter; and  this,  above  all  for  the  Englishman,  is 
excellent.  To  work  grossly  at  the  trade,  to 
forget  sentiment,  to  think  of  his  material  and 
nothing  else,  is,  for  a  while  at  least,  the  king's 
highway  of  progress.  Here,  in  England,  too 
many  painters  and  writers  dwell  dispersed,  un- 
shielded, among  the  intelligent  bourgeois. 
These,  when  they  are  not  merely  indifferent, 
prate  to  him  about  the  lofty  aims  and  moral 
influence  of  art.  And  this  is  the  lad's  ruin. 
For  art  is,  first  of  all  and  last  of  all,  a  trade. 
The  love  of  words  and  not  a  desire  to  publish 
new  discoveries,  the  love  of  form  and  not  a 
novel  reading  of  historical  events,  mark  the 
vocation  of  the  writer  and  the  painter.  The 
arabesque,  properly  speaking,  and  even  in 
literature,  is  the  first  fancy  of  the  artist;  he 
first  plays  with  his  material  as  a  child  plays 
with  a  kaleidoscope;  and  he  is  already  in  a 
second  stage  when  he  begins  to  use  his  pretty 
counters  for  the  end  of  representation.  In 
that,  he  must  pause  long  and  toil  faithfully; 
that  is  his  apprenticeship;  and  it  is  only  the 
few  who  will  really  grow  beyond  it,  and  go  for- 
ward, fully  equipped,  to  do  the  business  of 
real  art — to  give  life  to  abstractions  and  sig- 


OBSERVATIONS  81 

nificance  and  charm  to  facts.  In  the  mean- 
while, let  him  dwell  much  among  his  fellow- 
craftsmen.  They  alone  can  take  a  serious  in- 
terest in  the  childish  tasks  and  pitiful  successes 
of  these  years.  They  alone  can  behold  with 
equanimity  this  fingering  of  the  dumb  key- 
board, this  polishing  of  empty  sentences,  this 
dull  and  literal  painting  of  dull  and  insignificant 
subjects.  Outsiders  will  spur  him  on.  They 
will  say,  "Why  do  you  not  write  a  great  book? 
paint  a  great  picture?"  If  his  guardian  angel 
fail  him,  they  may  even  persuade  him  to  the 
attempt,  and,  ten  to  one,  his  hand  is  coarsened 
and  his  style  falsified  for  life. 

And  this  brings  me  to  a  warning.  The  life  of 
the  apprentice  to  any  art  is  both  unstrained 
and  pleasing;  it  is  strewn  with  small  successes 
in  the  midst  of  a  career  of  failure,  patiently 
supported;  the  heaviest  scholar  is  conscious  of 
a  certain  progress;  and  if  he  come  not  appreci- 
ably nearer  to  the  art  of  Shakespeare,  grows 
letter-perfect  in  the  domain  of  A-B,  ab.  But 
the  time  comes  when  a  man  should  cease 
prelusory  gymnastic,  stand  up,  put  a  violence 
upon  his  will,  and  for  better  or  worse,  begin  the 
business  of  creation.  This  evil  day  there  is  a 
tendency  continually  to  postpone. 

— Fontainebleau. 


82  LEARNING  TO  WRITE 

in 

Importance  of  Style  in  Writing 

It  was  by  his  style,  and  not  by  his  matter, 
that  Burns  affected  Wordsworth  and  the 
world.  There  is,  indeed,  only  one  merit  worth 
considering  in  a  man  of  letters — that  he  should 
write  well;  and  only  one  damning  fault — that 
he  should  write  ill.  We  are  little  the  better  for 
the  reflections  of  the  sailor's  parrot  in  the 
story.  And  so,  if  Burns  helped  to  change  the 
course  of  literary  history,  it  was  by  his  frank, 
direct,  and  masterly  utterance,  and  not  by  his 
homely  choice  of  subjects.  That  was  imposed 
upon  him,  not  chosen  upon  a  principle.  He 
wrote  from  his  own  experience,  because  it  was 
his  nature  so  to  do,  and  the  tradition  of  the 
school  from  which  he  proceeded  was  fortunately 
not  opposed  to  homely  subjects.  But  to  these 
homely  subjects  he  communicated  the  rich 
commentary  of  his  nature;  they  were  all  steeped 
in  Burns;  and  they  interest  us  not  in  them- 
selves, but  because  they  have  been  passed 
through  the  spirit  of  so  genuine  and  vigorous  a 
man.  Such  is  the  stamp  of  living  literature; 
and  there  was  never  any  more  alive  than  that 
of  Burns. 

— Some  Aspects  of  Robert  Burns. 


OBSERVATIONS  83 

IV 

Danger  of  Realism 

Beware  of  realism;  it  is  the  devil;  't  is  one 
of  the  means  of  art,  and  now  they  make  it  the 
end !  And  such  is  the  farce  of  the  age  in  which 
a  man  lives,  that  we  all,  even  those  of  us  who 
most  detest  it,  sin  by  realism. 

— Letter  to  Trevor  Haddon. 

V 

Difficulty  for  Beginners 

Anybody  can  write  a  short  story — a  bad  one, 
I  mean — who  has  industry  and  paper  and  time 
enough;  but  not  everyone  may  hope  to  write 
even  a  bad  novel.  It  is  the  length  that  kills. 
The  accepted  novelist  may  take  his  novel  up 
and  put  it  down,  spend  days  upon  it  in  vain, 
and  write  not  any  more  than  he  makes  haste  to 
blot.  Not  so  the  beginner.  Human  nature 
has  certain  rights;  instinct — the  instinct  of 
self-preservation — forbids  that  any  man  (cheered 
and  supported  by  the  consciousness  of  no  previ- 
ous victory)  should  endure  the  miseries  of  un- 
successful literary  toil  beyond  a  period  to  be 
measured  in  weeks.  There  must  be  something 
for  hope  to  feed  upon.    The  beginner  must  have 


84  LEARNING  TO  WRITE 

a  slant  of  wind,  a  lucky  vein  must  be  running, 
he  must  be  in  one  of  those  hours  when  the  words 
come  and  the  phrases  balance  of  themselves — 
even  to  begin.  And  having  begun,  what  a  dread 
looking  forward  is  that  until  the  book  shall  be 
accomplished!  For  so  long  a  time  the  slant  is 
to  continue  unchanged,  the  vein  to  keep  run- 
ning; for  so  long  a  time  you  must  hold  at  com- 
mand the  same  quality  of  style;  for  so  long  a 
time  your  puppets  are  to  be  always  vital,  al- 
ways consistent,  always  vigorous.  I  remember 
I  used  to  look,  in  those  days,  upon  every  three- 
volume  novel  with  a  sort  of  veneration,  as  a 
feat — not  possibly  of  literature — but  at  least  of 
physical  and  moral  endurance  and  the  courage 
of  Ajax. 

— My  First  Book — "Treasure  Island" 

VI 

Writing  Without  Effort 

When  truth  flows  from  a  man,  fittingly 
clothed  in  style  and  without  conscious  effort,  it 
is  because  the  effort  has  been  made  and  the 
work  practically  completed  before  he  sat  down 
to  write.  It  is  only  out  of  fulness  of  thinking 
that  expression  drops  perfect  like  a  ripe  fruit; 
and  when  Thoreau  wrote  so  nonchalantly  at 
his  desk,  it  was  because  he  had  been  vigor- 


OBSERVATIONS  85 

ously  active  during  his  walk.  For  neither  clear- 
ness, compression,  nor  beauty  of  language, 
come  to  any  living  creature  till  after  a  busy 
and  a  prolonged  acquaintance  with  the  subject 
on  hand.  Easy  writers  are  those  who,  like 
Walter  Scott,  choose  to  remain  contented  with 
a  less  degree  of  perfection  than  is  legitimately 
within  the  compass  of  their  powers.  We  hear 
of  Shakespeare  and  his  clean  manuscript;  but 
in  face  of  the  evidence  of  the  style  itself  and  of 
the  various  editions  of  Hamlet,  this  merely 
proves  that  Messrs.  Hemming  and  Condell  were 
unacquainted  with  the  common  enough  phenom- 
enon called  a  fair  copy.  He  who  would  recast 
a  tragedy  already  given  to  the  world  must  fre- 
quently and  earnestly  have  revised  details  in 
the  study.  Thoreau  himself,  and  in  spite  of 
his  protestations,  is  an  instance  of  even  ex- 
treme research  in  one  direction;  and  his  effort 
after  heroic  utterance  is  proved  not  only  by  the 
occasional  finish,  but  by  the  determined  exag- 
geration of  his  style.  "I  trust  you  realize  what 
an  exaggerator  I  am — that  I  lay  myself  out  to 
exaggerate,"  he  writes.  And  again,  hinting  at 
the  explanation:  "Who  that  has  heard  a  strain 
of  music  feared  lest  he  should  speak  extrava- 
gantly any  more  forever  ?  "  And  yet  once  more, 
in  his  essay  on  Carlyle,  and  this  time  with  his 
meaning  well  in  hand:  "No  truth,  we  think, 


86  LEARNING  TO  WRITE 

was  ever  expressed  but  with  this  sort  of  em- 
phasis, that  for  the  time  there  seemed  to  be  no 
other."  Thus  Thoreau  was  an  exaggerative 
and  a  parabolical  writer,  not  because  he  loved 
the  literature  of  the  East,  but  from  a  desire  that 
people  should  understand  and  realise  what  he 
was  writing.  He  was  near  the  truth  upon  the 
general  question;  but  in  his  own  particular 
method,  it  appears  to  me,  he  wandered.  Litera- 
ture is  not  less  a  conventional  art  than  painting 
or  sculpture;  and  it  is  the  least  striking,  as  it 
is  the  most  comprehensive  of  the  three.  To 
hear  a  strain  of  music,  to  see  a  beautiful  woman, 
a  river,  a  great  city,  or  a  starry  night,  is  to 
make  a  man  despair  of  his  Lilliputian  arts  in 
language.  Now,  to  gain  that  emphasis  which 
seems  denied  to  us  by  the  very  nature  of  the 
medium,  the  proper  method  of  literature  is  by 
selection,  which  is  a  kind  of  negative  exaggera- 
tion. It  is  the  right  of  the  literary  artist,  as 
Thoreau  was  on  the  point  of  seeing,  to  leave 
out  whatever  does  not  suit  his  purpose.  Thus 
we  extract  the  pure  gold;  and  thus  the  well- 
written  story  of  a  noble  life  becomes,  by  its 
very  omissions,  more  thrilling  to  the  reader. 
But  to  go  beyond  this,  like  Thoreau,  and  to 
exaggerate  directly,  is  to  leave  the  saner  clas- 
sical tradition,  and  to  put  the  reader  on  his 
guard.  And  when  you  write  the  whole  for  the 
half,  you  do  not  express  your  thought  more 


OBSERVATIONS  87 

forcibly,  but  only  express  a  different  thought 
which  is  not  yours. 

— Henry  David  Thoreau. 

VII 

Subjects  for  Poems 

The  contemporaries  of  Burns  were  surprised 
that  he  should  visit  so  many  celebrated  moun- 
tains and  waterfalls,  and  not  seize  the  oppor- 
tunity to  make  a  poem.  Indeed,  it  is  not  for 
those  who  have  a  true  command  of  the  art  of 
words,  but  for  peddling,  professional  amateurs, 
that  these  pointed  occasions  are  most  useful 
and  inspiring.  As  those  who  speak  French  im- 
perfectly are  glad  to  dwell  on  any  topic  they 
may  have  talked  upon  or  heard  others  talk 
upon  before,  because  they  know  appropriate 
words  for  it  in  French,  so  the  dabbler  in  verse 
rejoices  to  behold  a  waterfall  because  he  has 
learned  the  sentiment  and  knows  appropriate 
words  for  it  in  poetry. 

— Some  Aspects  of  Robert  Burns. 

VIII 

Stevenson's  Method  of  Writing 

I  used  to  write  as  slow  as  judgment;  now  I 
write  rather  fast;  but  I  am  still  "a  slow  study," 
and  sit  a  long  while  silent  on  my  eggs.    Uncon- 


88  LEARNING  TO  WRITE 

scious  thought,  there  is  the  only  method: 
macerate  your  subject,  let  it  boil  slow,  then 
take  the  lid  off  and  look  in — and  there  your 
stuff  is,  good  or  bad. 

— Letter  to  Craibe  Angus. 

IX 

Holding  the  Reader's  Attention 

Familiarity  has  a  cunning  disenchantment; 
in  a  day  or  two  she  can  steal  all  beauty  from  the 
mountain-tops;  and  the  most  startling  words 
begin  to  fall  dead  upon  the  ear  after  several  rep- 
etitions. If  you  see  a  thing  too  often,  you  no 
longer  see  it;  if  you  hear  a  thing  too  often,  you 
no  longer  hear  it.  Our  attention  requires  to 
be  surprised;  and  to  carry  a  fort  by  assault,  or 
to  gain  a  thoughtful  hearing  from  the  ruck  of 
mankind,  are  feats  of  about  an  equal  difficulty 
and  must  be  tried  by  not  dissimilar  means. 

— Lay  Morals. 
X 

Words 

Language  is  but  a  poor  bull's-eye  lantern 
wherewith  to  show  off  the  vast  cathedral  of 
the  world;  and  yet  a  particular  thing  once  said 
in  words  is  so  definite  and  memorable,  that  it 
makes  us  forget  the  absence  of  the  many  which 
remain  unexpressed;  like  a  bright  window  in  a 


OBSERVATIONS  89 

distant  view,  which  dazzles  and  confuses  our 
sight  of  its  surroundings.  There  are  not  words 
enough  in  all  Shakespeare  to  express  the  merest 
fraction  of  a  man's  experience  in  an  hour.  The 
speed  of  the  eyesight  and  the  hearing,  and  the 
continual  industry  of  the  mind,  produce,  in 
ten  minutes,  what  it  would  require  a  laborious 
volume  to  shadow  forth  by  comparisons  and 
roundabout  approaches.  If  verbal  logic  were 
sufficient,  life  would  be  as  plain  sailing  as  a 
piece  of  Euclid.  But,  as  a  matter  of  fact,  we 
make  a  travesty  of  the  simplest  process  of 
thought  when  we  put  it  into  words;  for  the 
words  are  all  coloured  and  forsworn,  apply  in- 
accurately, and  bring  with  them,  from  former 
uses,  ideas  of  praise  and  blame  that  have  noth- 
ing to  do  with  the  question  in  hand.  So  we 
must  always  see  to  it  nearly,  that  we  judge  by 
the  realities  of  life  and  not  by  the  partial  terms 
that  represent  them  in  man's  speech;  and  at 
times  of  choice,  we  must  leave  words  upon  one 
side,  and  act  upon  those  brute  convictions, 
unexpressed  and  perhaps  inexpressible,  which 
cannot  be  flourished  in  an  argument,  but  which 
are  truly  the  sum  and  fruit  of  our  experience. 
Words  are  for  communication,  not  for  judgment. 
This  is  what  every  thoughtful  man  knows  for 
himself,  for  only  fools  and  silly  schoolmasters 
push  definitions  over  far  into  the  domain  of 
conduct;  and  the  majority  of  women,  not  learned 


9o  LEARNING  TO  WRITE 

in  these  scholastic  refinements,  live  all-of-a-piece 
and  unconsciously,  as  a  tree  grows,  without  car- 
ing to  put  a  name  upon  their  acts  or  motives. 

— Walt  Whitman. 

XI 

Effectiveness  of  Profuse  Description 

[Speaking  of  "Notre  Dame  de  Paris "] 
Old  Paris  lives  for  us  with  newness  of  life: 
we  have  ever  before  our  eyes  the  city  cut  into 
three  by  the  two  arms  of  the  river,  the  boat- 
shaped  island  "moored"  by  five  bridges  to 
the  different  shores,  and  the  two  unequal 
towns  on  either  hand.  We  forget  all  that 
enumeration  of  palaces  and  churches  and  con- 
vents which  occupies  so  many  pages  of  admi- 
rable description,  and  the  thoughtless  reader 
might  be  inclined  to  conclude  from  this,  that 
they  were  pages  thrown  away;  but  this  is  not 
so:  we  forget,  indeed,  the  details,  as  we  forget 
or  do  not  see  the  different  layers  of  paint  on 
a  completed  picture;  but  the  thing  desired  has 
been  accomplished,  and  we  carry  away  with  us 
a  sense  of  the  "Gothic  profile"  of  the  city,  of 
the  "surprising  forest  of  pinnacles  and  towers 
and  belfries,"  and  we  know  not  what  of  rich 
and  intricate  and  quaint. 

— Victor  Hugo's  Romances. 


OBSERVATIONS  91 

XII 

Use  of  Recollections  in  Writing 

When  we  are  looking  at  a  landscape  we  think 
ourselves  pleased;  but  it  is  only  when  it  comes 
back  upon  us  by  the  fire  o'  nights  that  we  can 
disentangle  the  main  charm  from  the  thick  of 
particulars.  It  is  just  so  with  what  is  lately 
past.  It  is  too  much  loaded  with  detail  to  be 
distirct;  and  the  canvas  is  too  large  for  the  eye 
to  encompass.  But  this  is  no  more  the  case 
when  our  recollections  have  been  strained  long 
enough  through  the  hour-glass  of  time;  when 
they  have  been  the  burthen  of  so  much  thought, 
the  charm  and  comfort  of  so  many  a  vigil. 
All  that  is  worthless  has  been  sieved  and  sifted 
out  of  them.  Nothing  remains  but  the  bright- 
est lights  and  the  darkest  shadows.  When  we 
see  a  mountain  country  near  at  hand,  the  spurs 
and  haunches  crowd  up  in  eager  rivalry,  and 
the  whole  range  seems  to  have  shrugged  its 
shoulders  to  its  ears,  till  we  cannot  tell  the 
higher  from  the  lower:  but  when  we  are  far 
off,  these  lesser  prominences  are  melted  back 
into  the  bosom  of  the  rest,  or  have  set  behind 
the  round  horizon  of  the  plain,  and  the  highest 
peaks  stand  forth  in  lone  and  sovereign  dig- 
nity against  the  sky.    It  is  just  the  same  with 


92  LEARNING  TO  WRITE 

our  recollections.  We  require  to  draw  back 
and  shade  our  eyes  before  the  picture  dawns 
upon  us  in  full  breadth  and  outline.  Late 
years  are  still  in  limbo  to  us;  but  the  more  dis- 
tant past  is  all  that  we  possess  in  life,  the  corn 
already  harvested  and  stored  for  ever  in  the 
grange  of  memory.  The  doings  of  to-day  at 
some  future  time  will  gain  the  required  offing; 
I  shall  learn  to  love  the  things  of  my  adoles- 
cence, as  Hazlitt  loved  them,  and  as  I  love  al- 
ready the  recollections  of  my  childhood.  They 
will  gather  interest  with  every  year.  They  will 
ripen  in  forgotten  corners  of  my  memory;  and 
some  day  I  shall  waken  and  find  them  vested 
with  new  glory  and  new  pleasantness. 

— A  Retrospect. 

Very  much  as  a  painter  half  closes  his  eyes 
so  that  some  salient  unity  may  disengage  itself 
from  among  the  crowd  of  details,  and  what  he 
sees  may  thus  form  itself  into  a  whole;  very 
much  on  the  same  principle,  I  may  say,  I  al- 
low a  considerable  lapse  of  time  to  intervene 
between  any  of  my  little  journeyings  and  the 
attempt  to  chronicle  them.  I  cannot  describe 
a  thing  that  is  before  me  at  the  moment,  or 
that  has  been  before  me  only  a  very  little  while 
before;  I  must  allow  my  recollections  to  get 
thoroughly    strained    free   from    all    chaff    till 


OBSERVATIONS  93 

nothing  be  except  the  pure  gold;  allow  my  mem- 
ory to  choose  out  what  is  truly  memorable  by  a 
process  of  natural  selection;  and  I  piously  be- 
lieve that  in  this  way  I  ensure  the  Survival  of 
the  Fittest.  If  I  make  notes  for  future  use,  or 
if  I  am  obliged  to  write  letters  during  the  course 
of  my  little  excursion,  I  so  interfere  with  the 
process  that  I  can  never  again  find  out  what  is 
worthy  of  being  preserved,  or  what  should  be 
given  in  full  length,  what  in  torso,  or  what 
merely  in  profile.  This  process  of  incubation 
may  be  unreasonably  prolonged. 

— Cockermouth  and  Keswick. 


Those  who  try  to  be  artists  use,  time  after 
time,  the  matter  of  their  recollections,  setting 
and  resetting  little  coloured  memories  of  men 
and  scenes,  rigging  up  (it  may  be)  some  es- 
pecial friend  in  the  attire  of  a  buccaneer,  and 
decreeing  armies  to  manoeuvre,  or  murder  to 
be  done,  on  the  playground  of  their  youth. 
But  the  memories  are  a  fairy  gift  which  can- 
not be  worn  out  in  using.  After  a  dozen  ser- 
vices in  various  tales,  the  little  sunbright  pic- 
tures of  the  past  still  shine  in  the  mind's  eye 
with  not  a  lineament  defaced,  not  a  tint  im- 
paired. 

— Memoirs  of  an  Islet. 


94  LEARNING  TO  WRITE 

XIII 

Building  a  Character  for  a  Story 

And  then  I  had  an  idea  for  John  Silver  from 
which  I  promised  myself  funds  of  entertainment: 
to  take  an  admired  friend  of  mine  (whom  the 
reader  very  likely  knows  and  admires  as  much 
as  I  do),  to  deprive  him  of  all  his  finer  quali- 
ties and  higher  graces  of  temperament,  to  leave 
him  with  nothing  but  his  strength,  his  courage, 
his  quickness,  and  his  magnificent  geniality, 
and  to  try  to  express  these  in  terms  of  the  cul- 
ture of  a  raw  tarpaulin.  Such  psychical  sur- 
gery is,  I  think,  a  common  way  of  "making  char- 
acter"; perhaps  it  is,  indeed,  the  only  way. 
We  can  put  in  the  quaint  figure  that  spoke  a 
hundred  words  with  us  yesterday  by  the  way- 
side; but  do  we  know  him?  Our  friend,  with 
his  infinite  variety  and  flexibility,  we  know — 
but  can  we  put  him  in  ?  Upon  the  first  we  must 
engraft  secondary  and  imaginary  qualities, 
possibly  all  wrong;  from  the  second,  knife  in 
hand,  we  must  cut  away  and  deduct  the  need- 
less arborescence  of  his  nature;  but  the  trunk 
and  the  few  branches  that  remain  we  may  at 
least  be  fairly  sure  of. 

— My  First  Book — "Treasure  Island" 


OBSERVATIONS  95 

XIV 

How  We  Understand  Other  People 

We  can  only  know  others  by  ourselves.  The 
artistic  temperament  (a  plague  on  the  expres- 
sion !)  does  not  make  us  different  from  our  fel- 
low-men, or  it  would  make  us  incapable  of 
writing  novels;  and  the  average  man  (a  murrain 
on  the  word!)  is  just  like  you  and  me,  or  he 
would  not  be  average.  It  was  Whitman  who 
stamped  a  kind  of  Birmingham  sacredness  upon 
the  latter  phrase;  but  Whitman  knew  very 
well,  and  showed  very  nobly,  that  the  average 
man  was  full  of  joys  and  full  of  a  poetry  of  his 
own.  And  this  harping  on  life's  dulness  and 
man's  meanness  is  a  loud  profession  of  incom- 
petence; it  is  one  of  two  things:  the  cry  of  the 
blind  eye,  /  cannot  see,  or  the  complaint  of  the 
dumb  tongue,  /  cannot  utter.  To  draw  a  life 
without  delights  is  to  prove  I  have  not  realised 
it.  To  picture  a  man  without  some  sort  of 
poetry — well,  it  goes  near  to  prove  my  case,  for 
it  shows  an  author  may  have  little  enough. 
— The  Lantern  Bearers. 


q6         learning  to  write 

XV 

Writing  Character  Studies 

To  write  with  authority  about  another  man, 
we  must  have  fellow-feeling  and  some  common 
ground  of  experience  with  our  subject.  We 
may  praise  or  blame  according  as  we  find  him 
related  to  us  by  the  best  or  worst  in  ourselves; 
but  it  is  only  in  virtue  of  some  relationship  that 
we  can  be  his  judges,  even  to  condemn.  Feel- 
ings which  we  share  and  understand  enter  for 
us  into  the  tissue  of  the  man's  character;  those 
to  which  we  are  strangers  in  our  own  experience 
we  are  inclined  to  regard  as  blots,  exceptions, 
inconsistencies,  and  excursions  of  the  diabolic; 
we  conceive  them  with  repugnance,  explain 
them  with  difficulty,  and  raise  our  hands  to 
heaven  in  wonder  when  we  find  them  in  con- 
junction with  talents  that  we  respect  or  virtues 
that  we  admire.  David,  king  of  Israel,  would 
pass  a  sounder  judgment  on  a  man  than  either 
Nathaniel  or  David  Hume.  To  take  a  man's 
work  piecemeal,  except  with  the  design  of  ele- 
gant extracts,  is  the  way  to  avoid,  and  not  to 
perform,  the  critic's  duty.  If  you  are  so  sensibly 
pained  by  the  misconduct  of  your  subject,  and 
so  paternally  delighted  with  his  virtues,  you 


OBSERVATIONS  97 

will  always  be  an  excellent  gentleman,  but  a 
somewhat  questionable  biographer. 

— Some  Aspects  of  Robert  Burns. 

The  writer  of  short  studies,  having  to  con- 
dense in  a  few  pages  the  events  of  a  whole  life- 
time, and  the  effect  on  his  own  mind  of  many 
various  volumes,  is  bound,  above  all  things,  to 
make  that  condensation  logical  and  striking. 
For  the  only  justification  of  his  writing  at  all  is 
that  he  shall  present  a  brief,  reasoned,  and 
memorable  view.  By  the  necessity  of  the  case, 
all  the  more  neutral  circumstances  are  omitted 
from  his  narrative;  and  that  of  itself,  by  the 
negative  exaggeration  of  which  I  have  spoken 
in  the  text,  lends  to  the  matter  in  hand  a  cer- 
tain false  and  specious  glitter.  By  the  neces- 
sity of  the  case,  again,  he  is  forced  to  view  his 
subject  throughout  in  a  particular  illumination, 
like  a  studio  artifice.  Like  Hales  with  Pepys, 
he  must  nearly  break  his  sitter's  neck  to  get 
the  proper  shadows  on  the  portrait.  It  is  from 
one  side  only  that  he  has  time  to  represent  his 
subject.  The  side  selected  will  either  be  the 
one  most  striking  to  himself,  or  the  one  most 
obscured  by  controversy;  and  in  both  cases 
that  will  be  the  one  most  liable  to  strained  and 
sophisticated  reading.    In  a  biography,  this  and 


98  LEARNING  TO  WRITE 

that  is  displayed;  the  hero  is  seen  at  home,  play- 
ing the  flute;  the  different  tendencies  of  his 
work  come,  one  after  another,  into  notice;  and 
thus  something  like  a  true,  general  impression 
of  the  subject  may  at  last  be  struck.  But  in 
the  short  study,  the  writer,  having  seized  his 
" point  of  view,"  must  keep  his  eye  steadily  to 
that.  He  seeks,  perhaps,  rather  to  differentiate 
than  truly  to  characterise.  The  proportions  of 
the  sitter  must  be  sacrificed  to  the  proportions 
of  the  portrait;  the  lights  are  heightened,  the 
shadows  overcharged;  the  chosen  expression, 
continually  forced,  may  degenerate  at  length 
into  a  grimace;  and  we  have  at  best  something 
of  a  caricature,  at  worst  a  calumny.  Hence,  if 
they  be  readable  at  all,  and  hang  together  by 
their  own  ends,  the  peculiar  convincing  force  of 
these  brief  representations.  They  take  so  lit- 
tle a  while  to  read,  and  yet  in  that  little  while 
the  subject  is  so  repeatedly  introduced  in  the 
same  light  and  with  the  same  expression,  that, 
by  sheer  force  of  repetition,  that  view  is  imposed 
upon  the  reader.  The  two  English  masters  of 
the  style,  Macaulay  and  Carlyle,  largely  exem- 
plify its  dangers.  Carlyle,  indeed,  had  so  much 
more  depth  and  knowledge  of  the  heart,  his 
portraits  of  mankind  are  felt  and  rendered  with 
so  much  more  poetic  comprehension,  and  he, 


OBSERVATIONS  99 

like  his  favourite  Ram  Dass,  had  a  fire  in  his 
belly  so  much  more  hotly  burning  than  the 
patent  reading  lamp  by  which  Macaulay  studied, 
that  it  seems  at  first  sight  hardly  fair  to  bracket 
them  together.  But  the  "point  of  view"  was 
imposed  by  Carlyle  on  the  men  he  judged  of  in 
his  writings  with  an  austerity  not  only  cruel  but 
almost  stupid.  They  are  too  often  broken  out- 
right on  the  Procrustean  bed;  they  are  probably 
always  disfigured.  The  rhetorical  artifice  of 
Macaulay  is  easily  spied;  it  will  take  longer  to 
appreciate  the  moral  bias  of  Carlyle.  So  with 
all  writers  who  insist  on  forcing  some  significance 
from  all  that  comes  before  them;  and  the  writer 
of  short  studies  is  bound,  by  the  necessity  of  the 
case,  to  write  entirely  in  that  spirit.  What  he 
cannot  vivify  he  should  omit.  .  .  . 

Short  studies  are,  or  should  be,  things  woven 
like  a  carpet,  from  which  it  is  impossible  to  de- 
tach a  strand.  What  is  perverted  has  its  place 
there  forever,  as  a  part  of  the  technical  means 
by  which  what  is  right  has  been  presented.  It 
is  only  possible  to  write  another  study,  and 
then,  with  a  new  "point  of  view,"  would  follow 
new  perversions  and  perhaps  a  fresh  caricature. 
This  is  a  case  of  a  second  difficulty  which  lies 
continually  before  the  writer  of  critical  studies: 
that  he  has  to  mediate  between  the  author  whom 


ioo  LEARNING  TO  WRITE 

he  loves  and  the  public  who  are  certainly  in- 
different and  frequently  averse.  Where  you  see 
no  good,  silence  is  best. 

— Preface  "Familiar  Studies" 

XVI 

A  Trick  of  Heroines 

Readers  cannot  fail  to  have  remarked  that 
what  an  author  tells  us  of  the  beauty  or  the 
charm  of  his  creatures  goes  for  nought;  that  we 
know  instantly  better;  that  the  heroine  cannot 
open  her  mouth  but  what,  all  in  a  moment,  the 
fine  phrases  of  preparation  fall  from  round  her 
like  the  robes  from  Cinderella,  and  she  stands 
before  us,  self-betrayed,  as  a  poor,  ugly,  sickly 
wench,  or  perhaps  a  strapping  market-woman. 
Authors,  at  least,  know  it  well;  a  heroine  will 
too  often  start  the  trick  of  "getting  ugly";  and 
no  disease  is  more  difficult  to  cure.  I  said  au- 
thors; but  indeed  I  had  a  side  eye  to  one  author 
in  particular,  with  whose  works  I  am  very  well 
acquainted,  though  I  cannot  read  them,  and 
who  has  spent  many  vigils  in  this  cause,  sitting 
beside  his  ailing  puppets  and  (like  a  magician) 
wearying  his  art  to  restore  them  to  youth  and 
beauty. 

— "A  Gossip  on  Dumas  Novels." 


OBSERVATIONS  101 


XVII 

Difficulty  and  Advantage  of 
Collaboration 

The  great  difficulty  of  collaboration  is  that 
you  can't  explain  what  you  mean.  I  know  what 
kind  of  effect  I  mean  a  character  to  give — what 
kind  of  tache  he  is  to  make;  but  how  am  I  to 
tell  my  collaborator  in  words?  Hence  it  was 
necessary  to  say,  "Make  him  So-and-so";  and 
this  was  all  right  for  Nares  and  Pinkerton  and 
Loudon  Dodd,  whom  we  both  knew,  but  for 
Bellairs,  for  instance — a  man  with  whom  I 
passed  ten  minutes  fifteen  years  ago — what 
was  I  to  say?  and  what  could  Lloyd  do?  I, 
as  a  personal  artist,  can  begin  a  character  with 
only  a  haze  in  my  head,  but  how  if  I  have  to 
translate  the  haze  into  words  before  I  begin? 
In  our  manner  of  collaboration  (which  I  think 
the  only  possible — I  mean  that  of  one  person 
being  responsible,  and  giving  the  coup  de  pouce 
to  every  part  of  the  work)  I  was  spared  the 
obviously  hopeless  business  of  trying  to  explain 
to  my  collaborator  what  style  I  wished  a  pass- 
age to  be  treated  in.  These  are  the  times  that 
illustrate  to  a  man  the  inadequacy  of  spoken 
language.     Now — to  be  just  to  written  Ian- 


102  LEARNING  TO  WRITE 

guage-^-I  can  (or  could)  find  a  language  for  my 
every  mood,  but  how  could  I  tell  any  one  be- 
forehand what  this  effect  was  to  be,  which  it 
would  take  every  art  that  I  possessed,  and 
hours  and  hours  of  deliberate,  labour  and  selec- 
tion and  rejection,  to  produce?  These  are  the 
impossibilities  of  collaboration.  Its  immedi- 
ate advantage  is  to  focus  two  minds  together 
on  the  stuff,  and  to  produce  in  consequence  an 
extraordinary  greater  richness  of  purview,  con- 
sideration, and  invention. 

— Letter  to  R.  A.  M.  Stevenson. 

XVIII 

The  Importance  of  Narrative  in 
Literature 

The  true  business  of  literature  is  with  nar- 
rative; in  reasoned  narrative,  and  there  alone, 
that  art  enjoys  all  its  advantages,  and  suffers 
least  from  its  defects.  Dry  precept  and  dis- 
embodied disquisition,  as  they  can  only  be  read 
with  an  effort  of  abstraction,  can  never  convey 
a  perfectly  complete  or  a  perfectly  natural  im- 
pression. Truth,  even  in  literature,  must  be 
clothed  with  flesh  and  blood,  or  it  cannot  tell 
its  whole  story  to  the  reader.  Hence  the  effect 
of  anecdote  on  simple  minds;  and  hence  good 
biographies  and  works  of  high,  imaginative  art, 


OBSERVATIONS  103 

are  not  only  far  more  entertaining,  but  far  more 
edifying,  than  books  of  theory  or  precept. 

— Henry  David  Thoreau. 


XIX 

Subject  for  Literature 

My  theory  is  that  literature  must  always  be 
most  at  home  in  treating  movement  and  change; 
beneel  look  for  them. 

— Letter  to  Wm.  Archer. 

XX 

Spirit  in  Literature 

As  I  live,  I  feel  more  and  more  that  literature 
should  be  cheerful  and  brave-spirited,  even  if  it 
cannot  be  made  beautiful  and  pious  and  heroic. 
We  wish  it  to  be  a  green  place;  the  Waverley 
Novels  are  better  to  re-read  than  the  over-true 
Life,  fine  as  dear  Sir  Walter  was.  The  Bible, 
in  most  parts,  is  a  cheerful  book;  it  is  our  lit- 
tle piping  theologies,  tracts,  and  sermons  that 
are  dull  and  dowie;  and  even  the  Shorter 
Catechism,  which  is  scarcely  a  work  of  conso- 
lation, opens  with  the  best  and  shortest  and 
completest  sermon  ever  written — upon  Man's 

chief  end.  r  ..      •':*    _.  . 

— Letter  to  Mr.  Dick. 


104  LEARNING  TO  WRITE 

XXI 

What  Interests  Us  in  Robinson  Crusoe 

Emerson  mentions  having  once  remarked  to 
Thoreau:  "Who  would  not  like  to  write  some- 
thing which  all  can  read,  like  Robinson  Crusoe? 
and  who  does  not  see  with  regret  that  his  page 
is  not  solid  with  a  right  materialistic  treatment 
which  delights  everybody?"  I  must  say  in 
passing  that  it  is  not  the  right  materialistic 
treatment  which  delights  the  world  in  Robinson, 
but  the  romantic  and  philosophic  interest  of 

— Henry  David  Thoreau. 


XXII 

Books  We  Re-read 

The  books  that  we  re-read  the  oftenest  are 
not  always  those  that  we  admire  the  most;  we 
choose  and  we  revisit  them  for  many  and  vari- 
ous reasons,  as  we  choose  and  revisit  human 
friends. 


-  A  Gossip  on  Dumas  Novels" 


OBSERVATIONS  105 

XXIII 

When  the  Imagination  Grows  Stale 

He  who  indulges  habitually  in  the  intoxicat- 
ing pleasures  of  imagination,  for  the  very  rea- 
son that  he  reaps  a  greater  pleasure  than  others, 
must  resign  himself  to  a  keener  pain,  a  more 
intolerable  and  utter  prostration.  It  is  quite 
possible,  and  even  comparatively  easy,  so  to 
enfold  oneself  in  pleasant  fancies  that  the  real- 
ities of  life  may  seem  but  as  the  white  snow- 
shower  in  the  street,  that  only  gives  a  relish  to 
the  swept  hearth  and  lively  fire  within.  By 
such  means  I  have  forgotten  hunger,  I  have 
sometimes  eased  pain,  and  I  have  invariably 
changed  into  the  most  pleasant  hours  of  the 
day  those  very  vacant  and  idle  seasons  which 
would  otherwise  have  hung  most  heavily  upon 
my  hand.  But  all  this  is  attained  by  the  undue 
prominence  of  purely  imaginative  joys,  and 
consequently  the  weakening  and  almost  the 
destruction  of  reality.  This  is  buying  at  too 
great  a  price.  There  are  seasons  when  the 
imagination  becomes  somehow  tranced  and  sur- 
feited, as  it  is  with  me  this  morning;  and  then 
upon  what  can  we  fall  back  ?  The  very  faculty 
that  we  have  fostered  and  trusted  has  failed 
us  in  the  hour  of  trial;  and  we  have  so  blunted 


io6  LEARNING  TO  WRITE 

and  enfeebled  our  appetite  for  the  others  that 
they  are  subjectively  dead  to  us.  It  is  just  as 
though  a  farmer  should  plant  all  his  fields  in 
potatoes,  instead  of  varying  them  with  grain 
and  pasture;  and  so,  when  the  disease  comes, 
lose  all  his  harvest,  while  his  neighbours,  per- 
haps, may  balance  the  profit  and  the  loss.  Do 
not  suppose  that  I  am  exaggerating  when  I  talk 
about  all  pleasures  seeming  stale.  To  me,  at 
least,  the  edge  of  almost  everything  is  put  on  by 
imagination;  and  even  nature,  in  these  days 
when  the  fancy  is  drugged  and  useless,  wants 
half  the  charm  it  has  in  better  moments.  I  can 
no  longer  see  satyrs  in  the  thicket,  or  picture  a 
highwayman  riding  down  the  lane.  The  fiat 
of  indifference  has  gone  forth:  I  am  vacant, 
unprofitable:  a  leaf  on  a  river  with  no  volition 
and  no  aim:  a  mental  drunkard  the  morning 
after  an  intellectual  debauch.  Yes,  I  have  a 
more  subtle  opium  in  my  own  mind  than  any 
apothecary's  drug;  but  it  has  a  sting  of  its  own, 
and  leaves  me  as  flat  and  helpless  as  does  the 

— A  Retrospect. 

As  for  my  damned  literature,  God  knows 
what  a  business  it  is,  grinding  along  without  a 
scrap  of  inspiration  or  a  note  of  style.  But  it 
has  to  be  ground,  and  the  mill  grinds  exceed- 


OBSERVATIONS  107 

ing  slowly  though  not  particularly  small.  The 
last  two  chapters  have  taken  me  considerably 
over  a  month,  and  they  are  still  beneath  pity. 
This  I  cannot  continue,  time  not  sufficing;  and 
the  next  will  just  have  to  be  worse.  All  the 
good  I  can  express  is  just  this;  some  day,  when 
style  revisits  me,  they  will  be  excellent  matter 
to  rewrite.  Of  course,  my  old  cure  of  a  change 
of  work  would  probably  answer,  but  I  cannot 
take  it  now.  The  treadmill  turns;  and  with  a 
kind  of  desperate  cheerfulness,   I  mount  the 

— Vailima  Letters, 

XXIV 

An  Analysis  of  the  Fable  Form 

The  term  Fable  is  not  very  easy  to  define 
rigorously.  In  the  most  typical  form  some 
moral  precept  is  set  forth  by  means  of  a  con- 
ception purely  fantastic,  and  usually  somewhat 
trivial  into  the  bargain;  there  is  something  play- 
ful about  it,  that  will  not  support  a  very  exact- 
ing criticism,  and  the  lesson  must  be  appre- 
hended by  the  fancy  at  half  a  hint.  Such  is 
the  great  mass  of  the  old  stories  of  wise  animals 
or  foolish  men  that  have  amused  our  childhood. 
But  we  should  expect  the  fable,  in  company 
with  other  and  more  important  literary  forms, 


108  LEARNING  TO  WRITE 

to  be  more  and  more  loosely,  or  at  least  largely, 
comprehended  as  time  went  on,  and  so  to  de- 
generate in  conception  from  this  original  type. 
That  depended  for  much  of  its  piquancy  on  the 
very  fact  that  it  was  fantastic:  the  point  of  the 
thing  lay  in  a  sort  of  humorous  inappropriate- 
ness;  and  it  is  natural  enough  that  pleasantry 
of  this  description  should  become  less  common, 
as  men  learn  to  suspect  some  serious  analogy 
underneath.  Thus  a  comical  story  of  an  ape 
touches  us  quite  differently  after  the  proposition 
of  Mr.  Darwin's  theory.  Moreover  there  lay, 
perhaps,  at  the  bottom  of  this  primitive  sort  of 
fable,  a  humanity,  a  tenderness  of  rough  truths; 
so  that  at  the  end  of  some  story,  in  which  vice 
or  folly  had  met  with  its  destined  punishment, 
the  fabulist  might  be  able  to  assure  his  auditors, 
as  we  have  often  to  assure  tearful  children  on 
the  like  occasions,  that  they  may  dry  their 
eyes,  for  none  of  it  was  true. 

But  this  benefit  of  fiction  becomes  lost  with 
more  sophisticated  hearers  and  authors:  a  man 
is  no  longer  the  dupe  of  his  own  artifice,  and 
cannot  deal  playfully  with  truths  that  are  a 
matter  of  bitter  concern  to  him  in  his  life.  And 
hence,  in  the  progressive  centralisation  of  mod- 
ern thought,  we  should  expect  the  old  form  of 
fable  to  fall  gradually  into  desuetude,  and  be 
gradually  succeeded  by  another,  which  is  a 


OBSERVATIONS  109 

fable  in  all  points  except  that  it  is  not  alto- 
gether fabulous.  And  this  new  form,  such  as 
we  should  expect,  and  such  as  we  do  indeed 
find,  still  presents  the  essential  character  of 
brevity;  as  in  any  other  fable  also,  there  is,  un- 
derlying and  animating  the  brief  action,  a  moral 
idea;  and  as  in  any  other  fable,  the  object  is  to 
bring  this  home  to  the  reader  through  the  in- 
tellect rather  than  through  the  feelings;  so  that, 
without  being  very  deeply  moved  or  interested 
by  the  characters  of  the  piece,  we  should  recog- 
nise vividly  the  hinges  on  which  the  little  plot 
revolves.  But  the  fabulist  now  seeks  analogies 
where  before  he  merely  sought  humorous  situa- 
tions. There  will  be  now  a  logical  nexus  be- 
tween the  moral  expressed  and  the  machinery 
employed  to  express  it.  The  machinery,  in 
fact,  as  this  change  is  developed,  becomes  less 
and  less  fabulous.  We  find  ourselves  in  pres- 
ence of  quite  a  serious,  if  quite  a  miniature 
division  of  creative  literature;  and  sometimes 
we  have  the  lesson  embodied  in  a  sober,  every- 
day narration,  as  in  the  parables  of  the  New 
Testament,  and  sometimes  merely  the  state- 
ment or,  at  most,  the  collocation  of  significant 
facts  in  life,  the  reader  being  left  to  resolve  for 
himself  the  vague,  troublesome,  and  not  yet 
definitely  moral  sentiment  which  has  been  thus 
created.    And  step  by  step  with  the  develop- 


no  LEARNING  TO  WRITE 

ment  of  this  change,  yet  another  is  developed: 
the  moral  tends  to  become  more  indeterminate 
and  large.  It  ceases  to  be  possible  to  append 
it,  in  a  tag,  to  the  bottom  of  the  piece,  as  one 
might  write  the  name  below  a  caricature;  and 
the  fable  begins  to  take  rank  with  all  other 
forms  of  creative  literature,  as  something  too 
ambitious,  in  spite  of  its  miniature  dimensions, 
to  be  resumed  in  any  succinct  formula  without 
the  loss  of  all  that  is  deepest  and  most  sugges- 
tive in  it.  ~  .A .  . 

— Criticisms. 


XXV 

The  Genesis  of  "The  Master  of 
Ballantrae" 

I  was  walking  one  night  in  the  verandah  of  a 
small  house  in  which  I  lived,  outside  the  hamlet 
of  Saranac.  It  was  winter;  the  night  was  very 
dark;  the  air  extraordinary  clear  and  cold,  and 
sweet  with  the  purity  of  forests.  From  a  good 
way  below,  the  river  was  to  be  heard  contend- 
ing with  ice  and  boulders:  a  few  lights  appeared, 
scattered  unevenly  among  the  darkness,  but  so 
far  away  as  not  to  lessen  the  sense  of  isolation. 
For  the  making  of  a  story  here  were  fine  con- 
ditions. I  was  besides  moved  with  the  spirit 
of  emulation,  for  I  had  just  finished  my  third 


OBSERVATIONS  in 

or  fourth  perusal  of  The  Phantom  Ship,  "  Come," 
said  I  to  my  engine,  "let  us  make  a  tale,  a 
story  of  many  years  and  countries,  of  the  sea 
and  the  land,  savagery  and  civilisation;  a  story 
that  shall  have  the  same  large  features  and 
may  be  treated  in  the  same  summary  elliptic 
method  as  the  book  you  have  been  reading 
and  admiring."  I  was  here  brought  up  with  a 
reflection  exceedingly  just  in  itself,  but  which, 
as  the  sequel  shows,  I  failed  to  profit  by.  I 
saw  that  Marryat,  not  less  than  Homer,  Mil- 
ton, and  Virgil,  profited  by  the  choice  of  a 
familiar  and  legendary  subject;  so  that  he  pre- 
pared his  readers  on  the  very  title-page;  and 
this  set  me  cudgelling  my  brains,  if  by  any 
chance  I  could  hit  upon  some  similar  belief 
to  be  the  centrepiece  of  my  own  meditated  fic- 
tion. In  the  course  of  this  vain  search  there 
cropped  up  in  my  memory  a  singular  case  of  a 
buried  and  resuscitated  fakir,  which  I  had  been 
often  told  by  an  uncle  of  mine,  then  lately  dead, 
Inspector-General  John  Balfour. 

On  such  a  fine  frosty  night,  with  no  wind  and 
the  thermometer  below  zero,  the  brain  works 
with  much  vivacity;  and  the  next  moment  I 
had  seen  the  circumstance  transplanted  from 
India  and  the  tropics  to  the  Adirondack  wilder- 
ness and  the  stringent  cold  of  the  Canadian 
border.    Here  then,  almost  before  I  had  begun 


ii2  LEARNING  TO  WRITE 

my  story,  I  had  two  countries,  two  of  the  ends 
of  the  earth  involved:  and  thus  though  the  no- 
tion of  the  resuscitated  man  failed  entirely  on 
the  score  of  general  acceptation,  or  even  (as  I 
have  since  found)  acceptability,  it  fitted  at 
once  with  my  design  of  a  tale  of  many  lands; 
and  this  decided  me  to  consider  further  of  its 
possibilities.  The  man  who  should  thus  be 
buried  was  the  first  question:  a  good  man,  whose 
return  to  life  would  be  hailed  by  the  reader 
and  the  other  characters  with  gladness?  This 
trenched  upon  the  Christian  picture  and  was 
dismissed.  If  the  idea,  then,  was  to  be  of  any 
use  at  all  for  me,  I  had  to  create  a  kind  of  evil 
genius  to  his  friends  and  family,  take  him 
through  many  disappearances,  and  make  this 
final  restoration  from  the  pit  of  death,  in  the 
icy  American  wilderness,  the  last  and  grim- 
mest of  the  series.  I  need  not  tell  my  brothers 
of  the  craft  that  I  was  now  in  the  most  inter- 
esting moment  of  an  author's  life;  the  hours 
that  followed  that  night  upon  the  balcony,  and 
the  following  nights  and  days,  whether  walking 
abroad  or  lying  wakeful  in  my  bed,  were  hours 
of  unadulterated  joy.  My  mother,  who  was 
then  living  with  me  alone,  perhaps  had  less  en- 
joyment; for,  in  the  absence  of  my  wife,  who  is 
my  usual  helper  in  these  times  of  parturition, 
I  must  spur  her  up  at  all  seasons    to  hear 


OBSERVATIONS  113 

me  relate  and  try  to  clarify  my  unformed 
fancies. 

And  while  I  was  groping  for  the  fable  and  the 
characters  required,  behold,  I  found  them  lying 
ready  and  nine  years  old  in  my  memory.  Pease 
porridge  hot,  pease  porridge  cold,  pease  por- 
ridge in  the  pot,  nine  years  old.  Was  there 
ever  a  more  complete  justification  of  the  rule 
of  Horace?  Here,  thinking  of  quite  other 
things,  I  had  stumbled  on  the  solution,  or  per- 
haps I  should  rather  say  (in  stagewright  phrase) 
the  Curtain  or  final  Tableau  of  a  story  con- 
ceived long  before  on  the  moors  between  Pit- 
lochry and  Strathardle,  conceived  in  the  High- 
land rain,  in  the  blend  of  the  smell  of  heather 
and  bog-plants,  and  with  a  mind  full  of  the 
Athole  correspondence  and  the  memories  of  the 
dumlicide  Justice.  So  long  ago,  so  far  away  it 
was,  that  I  had  first  evoked  the  faces  and  the 
mutual  tragic  situation  of  the  men  of  Durisdeer. 

My  story  was  now  world-wide  enough:  Scot- 
land, India,  and  America  being  all  obligatory 
scenes.  But  of  these  India  was  strange  to  me 
except  in  books;  I  had  never  known  any  liv- 
ing Indian  save  a  Parsee,  a  member  of  my  club 
in  London,  equally  civilised  and  (to  all  seeing) 
equally  occidental  with  myself.  It  was  plain, 
thus  far,  that  I  should  have  to  get  into  India 
and  out  of  it  again  upon  a  foot  of  fairy  light- 


ii4  LEARNING  TO  WRITE 

ness;  and  I  believe  this  first  suggested  to  me  the 
idea  of  the  Chevalier  Burke  for  a  narrator.  It 
was  at  first  intended  that  he  should  be  Scot- 
tish, and  I  was  then  filled  with  fears  that  he 
might  prove  only  the  degraded  shadow  of  my 
own  Alan  Breck.  Presently,  however,  it  began 
to  occur  to  me  it  would  be  like  my  Master  to 
curry  favour  with  the  Prince's  Irishmen;  and 
that  an  Irish  refugee  would  have  a  particular 
reason  to  find  himself  in  India  with  his  country- 
man, the  unfortunate  Lally.  Irish,  therefore,  I 
decided  he  should  be,  and  then,  all  of  a  sudden, 
I  was  aware  of  a  tall  shadow  across  my  path, 
the  shadow  of  Barry  Lyndon.  No  man  (in 
Lord  Foppington's  phrase)  of  a  nice  morality 
could  go  very  deep  with  my  Master:  in  the 
original  idea  of  this  story  conceived  in  Scot- 
land, this  companion  had  been  besides  intended 
to  be  worse  than  the  bad  elder  son  with  whom 
(as  it  was  then  meant)  he  was  to  visit  Scotland; 
if  I  took  an  Irishman,  and  a  very  bad  Irishman, 
in  the  midst  of  the  eighteenth  century,  how  was 
I  to  evade  Barry  Lyndon?  The  wretch  be- 
sieged me,  offering  his  services;  he  gave  me  ex- 
cellent references;  he  proved  that  he  was 
highly  fitted  for  the  work  I  had  to  do;  he,  or 
my  own  evil  heart,  suggested  it  was  easy  to 
disguise  his  ancient  livery  with  a  little  lace  and 
a  few  frogs  and  buttons,  so  that  Thackeray 


OBSERVATIONS  115 

himself  should  hardly  recognise  him.  And  then 
of  a  sudden  there  came  to  me  memories  of  a 
young  Irishman,  with  whom  I  was  once  intimate, 
and  had  spent  long  nights  walking  and  talking 
with,  upon  a  very  desolate  coast  in  a  bleak 
autumn:  I  recalled  him  as  a  youth  of  an  extraor- 
dinary moral  simplicity — almost  vacancy;  plastic 
to  any  influence,  the  creature  of  his  admira- 
tions: and  putting  such  a  youth  in  fancy  into 
the  career  of  a  soldier  of  fortune,  it  occurred  to 
me  that  he  would  serve  my  turn  as  well  as  Mr. 
Lyndon,  and  in  place  of  entering  into  com- 
petition with  the  Master,  would  afford  a  slight 
though  a  distinct  relief.  I  know  not  if  I  have 
done  him  well,  though  his  moral  dissertations 
always  highly  entertained  me:  but  I  own  I  have 
been  surprised  to  find  that  he  reminded  some 
critics  of  Barry  Lyndon  after  all.  .  .  . 


How  the  Romantic  Movement  Freed  the 
Imagination  in  Writing 

With  Scott  the  Romantic  movement,  the 
movement  of  an  extended  curiosity  and  an  en- 
franchised imagination,  has  begun.  This  is  a 
trite  thing  to  say,  but  trite  things  are  often  very 
indefinitely    comprehended:    and    this    enfran- 


\ 


n6  LEARNING  TO  WRITE 

chisement,  in  as  far  as  it  regards  the  technical 
change  that  came  over  modern  prose  romance, 
has  never  perhaps  been  explained  with  any 
clearness. 

To  do  so,  it  will  be  necessary  roughly  to  com- 
pare the  two  sets  of  conventions  upon  which 
plays  and  romances  are  respectively  based.  The 
purposes  of  these  two  arts  are  so  much  alike, 
and  they  deal  so  much  with  the  same  passions 
and  interests,  that  we  are  apt  to  forget  the 
fundamental  opposition  of  their  methods.  And 
yet  such  a  fundamental  opposition  exists.  In 
the  drama  the  action  is  developed  in  great 
measure  by  means  of  things  that  remain  out- 
side of  the  art;  by  means  of  real  things,  that  is, 
and  not  artistic  conventions  for  things.  This 
is  a  sort  of  realism  that  is  not  to  be  confounded 
with  that  realism  in  painting  of  which  we 
hear  so  much.  The  realism  in  painting  is  a 
thing  of  purposes;  this,  that  we  have  to  indi- 
cate in  the  drama,  is  an  affair  of  method.  We 
have  heard  a  story,  indeed,  of  a  painter  in 
France  who,  when  he  wanted  to  paint  a  sea- 
beach,  carried  realism  from  his  ends  to  his 
means,  and  plastered  real  sand  upon  his  canvas; 
and  that  is  precisely  what  is  done  in  the  drama. 
The  dramatic  author  has  to  paint  his  beaches 
with  real  sand:  real  live  men  and  women  move 
about  the  stage;  we  hear  real  voices;  what  is 


OBSERVATIONS  117 

feigned  merely  puts  a  sense  upon  what  is;  we 
do  actually  see  a  woman  go  behind  a  screen  as 
Lady  Teazle,  and,  after  a  certain  interval,  we 
do  actually  see  her  very  shamefully  produced 
again.  Now  all  these  things,  that  remain  as 
they  were  in  life,  and  are  not  transmuted  into 
any  artistic  convention,  are  terribly  stubborn 
and  difficult  to  deal  with;  and  hence  there  are 
for  the  dramatist  many  resultant  limitations  in 
time  and  space.  These  limitations  in  some 
sort  approximate  toward  those  of  painting:  the 
dramatic  author  is  tied  down,  not  indeed  to  a 
moment,  but  to  the  duration  of  each  scene  or 
act;  he  is  confined  to  the  stage,  almost  as  the 
painter  is  confined  within  his  frame.  But  the 
great  restriction  is  this,  that  a  dramatic  author 
must  deal  with  his  actors,  and  with  his  actors 
alone.  Certain  moments  of  suspense,  certain 
significant  dispositions  of  personages,  a  certain 
logical  growth  of  emotion,  these  are  the  only 
means  at  the  disposal  of  the  playwright.  It 
is  true  that,  with  the  assistance  of  the  scene- 
painter,  the  costumer  and  the  conductor  of  the 
orchestra,  he  may  add  to  this  something  of 
pageant,  something  of  sound  and  fury;  but 
these  are,  for  the  dramatic  writer,  beside  the 
mark,  and  do  not  come  under  the  vivifying 
touch  of  his  genius.  When  we  turn  to  romance, 
we  find  this  no  longer.    Here  nothing  is  repro- 


n8  LEARNING  TO  WRITE 

duced  to  our  senses  directly.  Not  only  the 
main  conception  of  the  work,  but  the  scenery, 
the  appliances,  the  mechanism  by  which  this 
conception  is  brought  home  to  us,  have  been 
put  through  the  crucible  of  another  man's 
mind,  and  come  out  again,  one  and  all,  in  the 
form  of  written  words.  With  the  loss  of  every 
degree  of  such  realism  as  we  have  described, 
there  is  for  art  a  clear  gain  of  liberty  and  large- 
ness of  competence.  Thus,  painting,  in  which 
the  round  outlines  of  things  are  thrown  on  to  a 
flat  board,  is  far  more  free  than  sculpture,  in 
which  their  solidity  is  preserved.  It  is  by  giv- 
ing up  these  identities  that  art  gains  true 
strength.  And  so  in  the  case  of  novels  as  com- 
pared with  the  stage.  Continuous  narration  is 
the  flat  board  on  to  which  the  novelist  throws 
everything.  And  from  this  there  results  for 
him  a  great  loss  of  vividness,  but  a  great  com- 
pensating gain  in  his  power  over  the  subject; 
so  that  he  can  now  subordinate  one  thing  to 
another  in  importance,  and  introduce  all  man- 
ner of  very  subtle  detail,  to  a  degree  that  was 
before  impossible.  He  can  render  just  as  easily 
the  flourish  of  trumpets  before  a  victorious 
emperor  and  the  gossip  of  country  market 
women,  the  gradual  decay  of  forty  years  of  a 
man's  life  and  the  gesture  of  a  passionate  mo- 
ment.   He  finds  himself  equally  unable,  if  he 


OBSERVATIONS  119 

looks  at  it  from  one  point  of  view — equally- 
able,  if  he  looks  at  it  from  another  point  of 
view — to  reproduce  a  colour,  a  sound,  an  out- 
line, a  logical  argument,  a  physical  action.  He 
can  show  his  readers,  behind  and  around  the 
personages  that  for  the  moment  occupy  the 
foreground  of  his  story,  the  continual  suggestion 
of  the  landscape;  the  turn  of  the  weather  that 
will  turn  with  it  men's  lives  and  fortunes,  dimly 
foreshadowed  on  the  horizon;  the  fatality  of 
distant  events,  the  stream  of  national  tendency, 
the  salient  framework  of  causation.  And  all 
this  thrown  upon  the  flat  board — all  this  en- 
tering, naturally  and  smoothly,  into  the  tex- 
ture of  continuous  intelligent  narration. 

— Familiar  Studies  of  Men  and  Books. 


vm 

THE  MORALITY  OF  THE  PROFESSION 
OF  LETTERS 

The  profession  of  letters  has  been  lately  de- 
bated in  the  public  prints;  and  it  has  been  de- 
bated, to  put  the  matter  mildly,  from  a  point 
of  view  that  was  calculated  to  surprise  high- 
minded  men,  and  bring  a  general  contempt  on 
books  and  reading.  Some  time  ago,  in  par- 
ticular, a  lively,  pleasant,  popular  writer  de- 
voted an  essay,  lively  and  pleasant  like  himself, 
to  a  very  encouraging  view  of  the  profession. 
We  may  be  glad  that  his  experience  is  so  cheer- 
ing, and  we  may  hope  that  all  others,  who  de- 
serve it,  shall  be  as  handsomely  rewarded;  but 
I  do  not  think  we  need  be  at  all  glad  to  have  this 
question,  so  important  to  the  public  and  our- 
selves, debated  solely  on  the  ground  of  money. 
The  salary  in  any  business  under  heaven  is  not 
the  only,  nor  indeed  the  first,  question.  That 
you  should  continue  to  exist  is  a  matter  for  your 
own  consideration;  but  that  your  business 
should  be  first  honest,  and  second  useful,  are 
points  in  which  honour  and  morality  are  con- 


THE  PROFESSION  OF  LETTERS    121 

cerned.  If  the  writer  to  whom  I  refer  succeeds 
in  persuading  a  number  of  young  persons  to 
adopt  this  way  of  life  with  an  eye  set  singly  on 
the  livelihood,  we  must  expect  them  in  their 
works  to  follow  profit  only,  and  we  must  expect 
in  consequence,  if  he  will  pardon  me  the  epithets, 
a  slovenly,  base,  untrue,  and  empty  literature. 
Of  that  writer  himself  I  am  not  speaking:  he  is 
diligent,  clean,  and  pleasing;  we  all  owe  him 
periods  of  entertainment,  and  he  has  achieved 
an  amiable  popularity  which  he  has  adequately 
deserved.  But  the  truth  is,  he  does  not,  or  did 
not  when  he  first  embraced  it,  regard  his  pro- 
fession from  this  purely  mercenary  side.  He 
went  into  it,  I  shall  venture  to  say,  if  not  with 
any  noble  design,  at  least  in  the  ardour  of  a 
first  love;  and  he  enjoyed  its  practice  long  be- 
fore he  paused  to  calculate  the  wage.  The 
other  day  an  author  was  complimented  on  a 
piece  of  work,  good  in  itself  and  exceptionally 
good  for  him,  and  replied,  in  terms  unworthy  of 
a  commercial  traveller,  that  as  the  book  was 
not  briskly  selling  he  did  not  give  a  copper 
farthing  for  its  merit.  It  must  not  be  supposed 
that  the  person  to  whom  this  answer  was  ad- 
dressed received  it  as  a  profession  of  faith;  he 
knew,  on  the  other  hand,  that  it  was  only  a 
whiff  of  irritation;  just  as  we  know,  when  a 
respectable  writer  talks  of  literature  as  a  way 


122  LEARNING  TO  WRITE 

of  life,  like  shoemaking,  but  not  so  useful,  that 
he  is  only  debating  one  aspect  of  a  question, 
and  is  still  clearly  conscious  of  a  dozen  others 
more  important  in  themselves  and  more  central 
to  the  matter  in  hand.  But  while  those  who 
treat  literature  in  this  penny-wise  and  virtue- 
foolish  spirit  are  themselves  truly  in  possession 
of  a  better  light,  it  does  not  follow  that  the  treat- 
ment is  decent  or  improving,  whether  for  them- 
selves or  others.  To  treat  all  subjects  in  the 
highest,  the  most  honourable,  and  the  pluckiest 
spirit,  consistent  with  the  fact,  is  the  first  duty 
of  a  writer.  If  he  be  well  paid,  as  I  am  glad  to 
hear  he  is,  this  duty  becomes  the  more  urgent, 
the  neglect  of  it  the  more  disgraceful.  And 
perhaps  there  is  no  subject  on  which  a  man 
should  speak  so  gravely  as  that  industry,  what- 
ever it  may  be,  which  is  the  occupation  or  de- 
light of  his  life;  which  is  his  tool  to  earn  or  serve 
with;  and  which,  if  it  be  unworthy,  stamps  him- 
self as  a  mere  incubus  of  dumb  and  greedy 
bowels  on  the  shoulders  of  labouring  humanity. 
On  that  subject  alone  even  to  force  the  note 
might  lean  to  virtue's  side.  It  is  to  be  hoped 
that  a  numerous  and  enterprising  generation  of 
writers  will  follow  and  surpass  the  present  one; 
but  it  would  be  better  if  the  stream  were  stayed, 
and  the  roll  of  our  old,  honest  English  books 
were   closed,  than  that  esurient  book-makers 


THE  PROFESSION  OF  LETTERS    123 

should  continue  and  debase  a  brave  tradition, 
and  lower,  in  their  own  eyes,  a  famous  race. 
Better  that  our  serene  temples  were  deserted 
than  filled  with  trafficking  and  juggling  priests. 
There  are  two  just  reasons  for  the  choice  of 
any  way  of  life:  the  first  is  inbred  taste  in  the 
chooser;  the  second  some  high  utility  in  the 
industry  selected.  Literature,  like  any  other 
art,  is  singularly  interesting  to  the  artist;  and, 
in  a  degree  peculiar  to  itself  among  the  arts, 
it  is  useful  to  mankind.  These  are  the  sufficient 
justifications  for  any  young  man  or  woman  who 
adopts  it  as  the  business  of  his  life.  I  shall  not 
say  much  about  the  wages.  A  writer  can  live 
by  his  writing.  If  not  so  luxuriously  as  by 
other  trades,  then  less  luxuriously.  The  nature 
of  the  work  he  does  all  day  will  more  affect  his 
happiness  than  the  quality  of  his  dinner  at 
night.  Whatever  be  your  calling,  and  how- 
ever much  it  brings  you  in  the  year,  you  could 
still,  you  know,  get  more  by  cheating.  We  all 
suffer  ourselves  to  be  too  much  concerned  about 
a  little  poverty;  but  such  considerations  should 
not  move  us  in  the  choice  of  that  which  is  to 
be  the  business  and  justification  of  so  great  a 
portion  of  our  lives;  and  like  the  missionary, 
the  patriot,  or  the  philosopher,  we  should  all 
choose  that  poor  and  brave  career  in  which  we 
can  do  the  most  and  best  for  mankind.    Now 


124  LEARNING  TO  WRITE 

nature,  faithfully  followed,  proves  herself  a 
careful  mother.  A  lad,  for  some  liking  to  the 
jingle  of  words,  betakes  himself  to  letters  for 
his  life;  by-and-by,  when  he  learns  more  grav- 
ity, he  finds  that  he  has  chosen  better  than  he 
knew;  that  if  he  earns  little,  he  is  earning  it 
amply;  that  if  he  receives  a  small  wage,  he  is 
in  a  position  to  do  considerable  services;  that  it 
is  in  his  power,  in  some  small  measure,  to  pro- 
tect the  oppressed  and  to  defend  the  truth. 
So  kindly  is  the  world  arranged,  such  great 
profit  may  arise  from  a  small  degree  of  human 
reliance  on  oneself,  and  such,  in  particular,  is 
the  happy  star  of  this  trade  of  writing,  that  it 
should  combine  pleasure  and  profit  to  both 
parties,  and  be  at  once  agreeable,  like  fiddling, 
and  useful,  like  good  preaching. 

This  is  to  speak  of  literature  at  its  highest; 
and  with  the  four  great  elders  who  are  still 
spared  to  our  respect  and  admiration,  with 
Carlyle,  Ruskin,  Browning,  and  Tennyson  be- 
fore us,  it  would  be  cowardly  to  consider  it  at 
first  in  any  lesser  aspect.  But  while  we  cannot 
follow  these  athletes,  while  we  may  none  of 
us,  perhaps,  be  very  vigorous,  very  original,  or 
very  wise,  I  still  contend  that,  in  the  humblest 
sort  of  literary  work,  we  have  it  in  our  power 
either  to  do  great  harm  or  great  good.  We  may 
seek  merely  to  please;  we  may  seek,  having  no 


THE  PROFESSION  OF  LETTERS    125 

higher  gift,  merely  to  gratify  the  idle  nine  days' 
curiosity  of  our  contemporaries;  or  we  may 
essay,  however  feebly,  to  instruct.  In  each  of 
these  we  shall  have  to  deal  with  that  remark- 
able art  of  words  which,  because  it  is  the  dialect 
of  life,  comes  home  so  easily  and  powerfully 
to  the  minds  of  men;  and  since  that  is  so,  we 
contribute,  in  each  of  these  branches,  to  build 
up  the  sum  of  sentiments  and  appreciations 
which  goes  by  the  name  of  Public  Opinion  or 
Public  Feeling.  The  total  of  a  nation's  read- 
ing, in  these  days  of  daily  papers,  greatly  modi- 
fies the  total  of  the  nation's  speech;  and  the 
speech  and  reading,  taken  together,  form  the 
efficient  educational  medium  of  youth.  A  good 
man  or  woman  may  keep  a  youth  some  little 
while  in  clearer  air;  but  the  contemporary  at- 
mosphere is  all-powerful  in  the  end  on  the  aver- 
age of  mediocre  characters.  The  copious 
Corinthian  baseness  of  the  American  reporter 
or  the  Parisian  chroniquer,  both  so  lightly  read- 
able, must  exercise  an  incalculable  influence 
for  ill;  they  touch  upon  all  subjects,  and  on  all 
with  the  same  ungenerous  hand;  they  begin  the 
consideration  of  all,  in  young  and  unprepared 
minds,  in  an  unworthy  spirit;  on  all,  they  sup- 
ply some  pungency  for  dull  people  to  quote. 
The  mere  body  of  this  ugly  matter  overwhelms 
the  rare  utterances  of  good  men;  the  sneering, 


126  LEARNING  TO  WRITE 

the  selfish,  and  the  cowardly  are  scattered  in 
broad  sheets  on  every  table,  while  the  antidote, 
in  small  volumes,  lies  unread  upon  the  shelf. 
I  have  spoken  of  the  American  and  the  French, 
not  because  they  are  so  much  baser,  but  so 
much  more  readable,  than  the  English;  their 
evil  is  done  more  effectively,  in  America  for 
the  masses,  in  French  for  the  few  that  care  to 
read;  but  with  us  as  with  them,  the  duties  of 
literature  are  daily  neglected,  truth  daily  per- 
verted and  suppressed,  and  grave  subjects  daily 
degraded  in  the  treatment.  The  journalist  is 
not  reckoned  an  important  officer;  yet  judge 
of  the  good  he  might  do,  the  harm  he  does; 
judge  of  it  by  one  instance  only:  that  when  we 
find  two  journals  on  the  reverse  sides  of  politics 
each,  on  the  same  day,  openly  garbling  a  piece 
of  news  for  the  interest  of  its  own  party,  we 
smile  at  the  discovery  (no  discovery  now!)  as 
over  a  good  joke  and  pardonable  stratagem. 
Lying  so  open  is  scarce  lying,  it  is  true;  but  one 
of  the  things  that  we  profess  to  teach  our  young 
is  a  respect  for  truth;  and  I  cannot  think  this 
piece  of  education  will  be  crowned  with  any 
great  success,  so  long  as  some  of  us  practise 
and  the  rest  openly  approve  of  public  falsehood. 
There  are  two  duties  incumbent  upon  any 
man  who  enters  on  the  business  of  writing:  truth 
to  the  fact  and  a  good  spirit  in  the  treatment. 


THE  PROFESSION  OF  LETTERS    127 

In  every  department  of  literature,  though  so 
low  as  hardly  to  deserve  the  name,  truth  to  the 
fact  is  of  importance  to  the  education  and  com- 
fort of  mankind,  and  so  hard  to  preserve,  that 
the  faithful  trying  to  do  so  will  lend  some 
dignity  to  the  man  who  tries  it.  Our  judg- 
ments are  based  upon  two  things:  first,  upon 
the  original  preferences  of  our  soul;  but,  second, 
upon  the  mass  of  testimony  to  the  nature  of 
God,  man,  and  the  universe  which  reaches  us, 
in  divers  manners,  from  without.  For  the  most 
part  these  divers  manners  are  reducible  to  one, 
all  that  we  learn  of  past  times  and  much  that 
we  learn  of  our  own  reaching  us  through  the 
medium  of  books  or  papers,  and  even  he  who 
cannot  read  learning  from  the  same  source  at 
second-hand  and  by  the  report  of  him  who 
can.  Thus  the  sum  of  the  contemporary 
knowledge  or  ignorance  of  good  and  evil  is,  in 
large  measure,  the  handiwork  of  those  who 
write.  Those  who  write  have  to  see  that  each 
man's  knowledge  is,  as  near  as  they  can  make 
it,  answerable  to  the  facts  of  life;  that  he  shall 
not  suppose  himself  an  angel  or  a  monster; 
nor  take  this  world  for  a  hell;  nor  be  suffered 
to  imagine  that  all  rights  are  concentred  in 
his  own  caste  or  country,  or  all  veracities  in 
his  own  parochial  creed.  Each  man  should  learn 
what  is  within  him,  that  he  may  strive  to  mend; 


128  LEARNING  TO  WRITE 

he  must  be  taught  what  is  without  him,  that 
he  may  be  kind  to  others.  It  can  never  be 
wrong  to  tell  him  the  truth;  for,  in  his  disputable 
state,  weaving  as  he  goes  his  theory  of  life, 
steering  himself,  cheering  or  reproving  others, 
all  facts  are  of  the  first  importance  to  his  con- 
duct; and  even  if  a  fact  shall  discourage  or 
corrupt  him,  it  is  still  best  that  he  should  know 
it;  for  it  is  in  this  world  as  it  is,  and  not  in  a 
world  made  easy  by  educational  suppressions, 
that  he  must  win  his  way  to  shame  or  glory. 
In  one  word,  it  must  always  be  foul  to  tell  what 
is  false;  and  it  can  never  be  safe  to  suppress 
what  is  true.  The  very  fact  that  you  omit 
may  be  the  fact  which  somebody  was  wanting, 
for  one  man's  meat  is  another  man's  poison, 
and  I  have  known  a  person  who  was  cheered 
by  the  perusal  of  Candide.  Every  fact  is  a  part 
of  that  great  puzzle  we  must  set  together;  and 
none  that  comes  directly  in  a  writer's  path  but 
has  some  nice  relations,  unperceivable  by  him, 
to  the  totality  and  bearing  of  the  subject  under 
hand.  Yet  there  are  certain  classes  of  fact 
eternally  more  necessary  than  others,  and  it  is 
with  these  that  literature  must  first  bestir  it- 
self. They  are  not  hard  to  distinguish,  nature 
once  more  easily  leading  us;  for  the  necessary, 
because  the  efficacious,  facts  are  those  which 
are  most  interesting  to  the  natural  mind  of 


THE  PROFESSION  OF  LETTERS    129 

man.  Those  which  are  coloured,  picturesque, 
human,  and  rooted  in  morality,  and  those,  on 
the  other  hand,  which  are  clear,  indisputable, 
and  a  part  of  science,  are  alone  vital  in  impor- 
tance, seizing  by  their  interest,  or  useful  to 
communicate.  So  far  as  the  writer  merely  nar- 
rates, he  should  principally  tell  of  these.  He 
should  tell  of  the  kind  and  wholesome  and 
beautiful  elements  of  our  life;  he  should  tell 
unsparingly  of  the  evil  and  sorrow  of  the  pres- 
ent, to  move  us  with  instances;  he  should  tell 
of  wise  and  good  people  in  the  past,  to  excite  us 
by  example;  and  of  these  he  should  tell  soberly 
and  truthfully,  not  glossing  faults,  that  we  may 
neither  grow  discouraged  with  ourselves  nor 
exacting  to  our  neighbours.  So  the  body  of 
contemporary  literature,  ephemeral  and  feeble 
in  itself,  touches  in  the  minds  of  men  the  springs 
of  thought  and  kindness,  and  supports  them 
(for  those  who  will  go  at  all  are  easily  sup- 
ported) on  their  way  to  what  is  true  and  right. 
And  if,  in  any  degree,  it  does  so  now,  how  much 
more  might  it  do  so  if  the  writers  chose !  There 
is  not  a  life  in  all  the  records  of  the  past  but, 
properly  studied,  might  lend  a  hint  and  a  help 
to  some  contemporary.  There  is  not  a  junc- 
ture in  to-day's  affairs  but  some  useful  word 
may  yet  be  said  of  it.  Even  the  reporter  has 
an  office,  and,  with  clear  eyes  and  honest  Ian- 


i3o  LEARNING  TO  WRITE 

guage,  may  unveil  injustices  and  point  the  way 
to  progress.  And  for  a  last  word:  in  all  narra- 
tion there  is  only  one  way  to  be  clever,  and 
that  is  to  be  exact.  To  be  vivid  is  a  secondary 
quality  which  must  presuppose  the  first;  for 
vividly  to  convey  a  wrong  impression  is  only  to 
make  failure  conspicuous. 

But  a  fact  may  be  viewed  on  many  sides;  it 
may  be  chronicled  with  rage,  tears,  laughter, 
indifference,  or  admiration,  and  by  each  of 
these  the  story  will  be  transformed  to  something 
else.  The  newspapers  that  told  of  the  return 
of  our  representatives  from  Berlin,  even  if 
they  had  not  differed  as  to  the  facts,  would 
have  sufficiently  differed  by  their  spirits;  so 
that  the  one  description  would  have  been  a 
second  ovation,  and  the  other  a  prolonged  in- 
sult. The  subject  makes  but  a  trifling  part  of 
any  piece  of  literature,  and  the  view  of  the 
writer  is  itself  a  fact  more  important  because 
less  disputable  than  the  others.  Now  this  spirit 
in  which  a  subject  is  regarded,  important  in  all 
kinds  of  literary  work,  becomes  all-important  in 
works  of  fiction,  meditation,  or  rhapsody;  for 
there  it  not  only  colours  but  itself  chooses  the 
facts;  not  only  modifies  but  shapes  the  work. 
And  hence,  over  the  far  larger  proportion  of  the 
field  of  literature,  the  health  or  disease  of  the 


THE  PROFESSION  OF  LETTERS    131 

writers  mind  or  momentary  humour  forms  not 
only  the  leading  feature  of  his  work,  but  is,  at 
bottom,  the  only  thing  he  can  communicate  to 
others.  In  all  works  of  art,  widely  speaking, 
it  is  first  of  all  the  author's  attitude  that  is 
narrated,  though  in  the  attitude  there  be  im- 
plied a  whole  experience  and  a  theory  of  life. 
An  author  who  has  begged  the  question  and 
reposes  in  some  narrow  faith  cannot,  if  he  would, 
express  the  whole  or  even  many  of  the  sides  of 
this  various  existence;  for,  his  own  life  being 
maim,  some  of  them  are  not  admitted  in  his 
theory,  and  were  only  dimly  and  unwillingly 
recognised  in  his  experience.  Hence  the  small- 
ness,  the  triteness,  and  the  inhumanity  in  works 
of  merely  sectarian  religion;  and  hence  we  find 
equal  although  unsimilar  limitation  in  works 
inspired  by  the  spirit  of  the  flesh  or  the  despi- 
cable taste  for  high  society.  So  that  the  first 
duty  of  any  man  who  is  to  write  is  intellectual. 
Designedly  or  not,  he  has  so  far  set  himself  up 
for  a  leader  of  the  minds  of  men;  and  he  must 
see  that  his  own  mind  is  kept  supple,  charitable, 
and  bright.  Everything  but  prejudice  should 
find  a  voice  through  him;  he  should  see  the  good 
in  all  things;  where  he  has  even  a  fear  that  he 
does  not  wholly  understand,  there  he  should 
be  wholly  silent;  and  he  should  recognise  from 


i32  LEARNING  TO  WRITE 

the  first  that  he  has  only  one  tool  in  his  work- 
shop, and  that  tool  is  sympathy.* 

The  second  duty,  far  harder  to  define,  is 
moral.  There  are  a  thousand  different  humours 
in  the  mind,  and  about  each  of  them,  when  it  is 
uppermost,  some  literature  tends  to  be  depos- 
ited. Is  this  to  be  allowed?  Not  certainly  in 
every  case,  and  yet  perhaps  in  more  than  rig- 
ourists  would  fancy.  It  were  to  be  desired  that 
all  literary  work,  and  chiefly  works  of  art, 
issued  from  sound,  human,  healthy,  and  potent 
impulses,  whether  grave  or  laughing,  humor- 
ous, romantic,  or  religious.  Yet  it  cannot  be 
denied  that  some  valuable  books  are  partially 
insane;  some,  mostly  religious,  partially  in- 
human; and  very  many  tainted  with  morbidity 
and  impotence.  We  do  not  loathe  a  master- 
piece although  we  gird  against  its  blemishes. 
We  are  not,  above  all,  to  look  for  faults,  but 
merits.  There  is  no  book  perfect,  even  in  de- 
sign; but  there  are  many  that  will  delight, 
improve,  or  encourage  the  reader.  On  the 
one  hand,  the  Hebrew  psalms  are  the  only  re- 

*  A  footnote,  at  least,  is  due  to  the  admirable  example  set 
before  all  young  writers  in  the  width  of  literary  sympathy  dis- 
played by  Mr.  Swinburne.  He  runs  forth  to  welcome  merit, 
whether  in  Dickens  or  Trollope,  whether  in  Villon,  Milton,  or 
Pope.  This  is,  in  criticism,  the  attitude  we  should  all  seek  to 
preserve,  not  only  in  that,  but  in  every  branch  of  literary 
work. 


THE  PROFESSION  OF  LETTERS    133 

ligious  poetry  on  earth;  yet  they  contain  sallies 
that  savour  rankly  of  the  man  of  blood.  On 
the  other  hand,  Alfred  de  Musset  had  a  poi- 
soned and  a  contorted  nature;  I  am  only  quoting 
that  generous  and  frivolous  giant,  old  Dumas, 
when  I  accuse  him  of  a  bad  heart;  yet,  when  the 
impulse  under  which  he  wrote  was  purely  crea- 
tive, he  could  give  us  works  like  Carmosine  or 
Fantasio,  in  which  the  last  note  of  the  romantic 
comedy  seems  to  have  been  found  again  to 
touch  and  please  us.  When  Flaubert  wrote 
Madame  Bovary,  I  believe  he  thought  chiefly  of 
a  somewhat  morbid  realism;  and  behold!  the 
book  turned  in  his  hands  into  a  masterpiece  of 
appalling  morality.  But  the  truth  is,  when 
books  are  conceived  under  a  great  stress,  with 
a  soul  of  ninefold  power,  nine  times  heated 
and  electrified  by  effort,  the  conditions  of  our 
being  are  seized  with  such  an  ample  grasp,  that, 
even  should  the  main  design  be  trivial  or  base, 
some  truth  and  beauty  cannot  fail  to  be  ex- 
pressed. Out  of  the  strong  comes  forth  sweet- 
ness; but  an  ill  thing  poorly  done  is  an  ill  thing 
top  and  bottom.  And  so  this  can  be  no  encour- 
agement to  knock-kneed,  feeble-wristed  scribes, 
who  must  take  their  business  conscientiously  or 
be  ashamed  to  practise  it. 

Man  is  imperfect;  yet,  in  his  literature,  he 
must  express  himself  and  his  own  views  and 


134  LEARNING  TO  WRITE 

preferences;  for  to  do  anything  else  is  to  do  a 
far  more  perilous  thing  than  to  risk  being  im- 
moral: it  is  to  be  sure  of  being  untrue.  To  ape 
a  sentiment,  even  a  good  one,  is  to  travesty  a 
sentiment;  that  will  not  be  helpful.  To  con- 
ceal a  sentiment,  if  you  are  sure  you  hold  it,  is 
to  take  a  liberty  with  truth.  There  is  prob- 
ably no  point  of  view  possible  to  a  sane  man  but 
contains  some  truth  and,  in  the  true  connec- 
tion, might  be  profitable  to  the  race.  I  am  not 
afraid  of  the  truth,  if  any  one  could  tell  it  me, 
but  I  am  afraid  of  parts  of  it  impertinently  ut- 
tered. There  is  a  time  to  dance  and  a  time  to 
mourn;  to  be  harsh  as  well  as  to  be  sentimental; 
to  be  ascetic  as  well  as  to  glorify  the  appetites; 
and  if  a  man  were  to  combine  all  these  extremes 
into  his  work,  each  in  its  place  and  proportion, 
that  work  would  be  the  worlds  masterpiece  of 
morality  as  well  as  of  art.  Partiality  is  im- 
morality; for  any  book  is  wrong  that  gives  a 
misleading  picture  of  the  world  and  life.  The 
trouble  is  that  the  weakling  must  be  partial;  the 
work  of  one  proving  dank  and  depressing;  of 
another,  cheap  and  vulgar;  of  a  third,  epilep- 
tically  sensual;  of  a  fourth,  sourly  ascetic.  In 
literature  as  in  conduct,  you  can  never  hope  to 
do  exactly  right.  All  you  can  do  is  to  make  as 
sure  as  possible;  and  for  that  there  is  but  one 
rule.    Nothing  should  be  done  in  a  hurry  that 


THE  PROFESSION  OF  LETTERS    135 

can  be  done  slowly.  It  is  no  use  to  write  a 
book  and  put  it  by  for  nine  or  even  ninety 
years;  for  in  the  writing  you  will  have  partly 
convinced  yourself;  the  delay  must  precede  any 
beginning;  and  if  you  meditate  a  work  of  art, 
you  should  first  long  roll  the  subject  under  the 
tongue  to  make  sure  you  like  the  flavour,  be- 
fore you  brew  a  volume  that  shall  taste  of  it 
from  end  to  end;  or  if  you  propose  to  enter  on 
the  field  of  controversy,  you  should  first  have 
thought  upon  the  question  under  all  conditions, 
in  health  as  well  as  in  sickness,  in  sorrow  as 
well  as  in  joy.  It  is  this  nearness  of  examina- 
tion necessary  for  any  true  and  kind  writing, 
that  makes  the  practice  of  the  art  a  prolonged 
and  noble  education  for  the  writer. 

There  is  plenty  to  do,  plenty  to  say,  or  to  say 
over  again,  in  the  meantime.  Any  literary  work 
which  conveys  faithful  facts  or  pleasing  im- 
pressions is  a  service  to  the  public.  It  is  even  a 
service  to  be  thankfully  proud  of  having  ren- 
dered. The  slightest  novels  are  a  blessing  to 
those  in  distress,  not  chloroform  itself  a  greater. 
Our  fine  old  sea-captain's  life  was  justified  when 
Carlyle  soothed  his  mind  with  The  King's  Own 
or  Newton  Forster.  To  please  is  to  serve;  and 
so  far  from  its  being  difficult  to  instruct  while 
you  amuse,  it  is  difficult  to  do  the  one  thoroughly 
without  the  other.    Some  part  of  the  writer  or 


136  LEARNING  TO  WRITE 

his  life  will  crop  out  in  even  a  vapid  book;  and 
to  read  a  novel  that  was  conceived  with  any 
force  is  to  multiply  experience  and  to  exercise 
the  sympathies.  Every  article,  every  piece  of 
verse,  every  essay,  every  entre-filet,  is  destined 
to  pass,  however  swiftly,  through  the  minds  of 
some  portion  of  the  public,  and  to  colour,  how- 
ever transiently,  their  thoughts.  When  any 
subject  falls  to  be  discussed,  some  scribbler  on  a 
paper  has  the  invaluable  opportunity  of  be- 
ginning its  discussion  in  a  dignified  and  human 
spirit;  and  if  there  were  enough  who  did  so  in 
our  public  press,  neither  the  public  nor  the 
Parliament  would  find  it  in  their  minds  to  drop 
to  meaner  thoughts.  The  writer  has  the  chance 
to  stumble,  by  the  way,  on  something  pleasing, 
something  interesting,  something  encouraging, 
were  it  only  to  a  single  reader.  He  will  be 
unfortunate,  indeed,  if  he  suit  no  one.  He  has 
the  chance,  besides,  to  stumble  on  something 
that  a  dull  person  shall  be  able  to  comprehend; 
and  for  a  dull  person  to  have  read  anything 
and,  for  that  once,  comprehended  it,  makes  a 
marking  epoch  in  his  education. 

Here,  then,  is  work  worth  doing  and  worth 
trying  to  do  well.  And  so,  if  I  were  minded  to 
welcome  any  great  accession  to  our  trade,  it 
should  not  be  from  any  reason  of  a  higher 
wage,  but  because  it  was  a  trade  which  was 


THE  PROFESSION  OF  LETTERS    137 

useful  in  a  very  great  and  in  a  very  high  de- 
gree; which  every  honest  tradesman  could  make 
more  serviceable  to  mankind  in  his  single 
strength;  which  was  difficult  to  do  well  and 
possible  to  do  better  every  year;  which  called 
for  scrupulous  thought  on  the  part  of  all  who 
practised  it,  and  hence  became  a  perpetual 
education  to  their  nobler  natures;  and  which, 
pay  it  as  you  please,  in  the  large  majority  of 
the  best  cases  will  still  be  underpaid.  For 
surely,  at  this  time  of  day  in  the  nineteenth 
century,  there  is  nothing  that  an  honest  man 
should  fear  more  timorously  than  getting  and 
spending  more  than  he  deserves. 


POPULAR  AUTHORS 

The  scene  is  the  deck  of  an  Atlantic  liner, 
close  by  the  doors  of  the  ashpit,  where  it  is 
warm:  the  time,  night:  the  persons,  an  emigrant 
of  an  mquiring  turn  of  mind  and  a  deck  hand. 
"Now,"  says  the  emigrant,  "is  there  not  any 
book  that  gives  a  true  picture  of  a  sailor's 
life?"— "Well,"  returns  the  other,  with  great 
deliberation  and  emphasis,  "there  is  one;  that 
is  just  a  sailor's  life.  You  know  all  about  it,  if 
you  know  that."— "What  do  you  call  it?" 
asks  the  emigrant. — "They  call  it  Tom  HoWs 
Log,"  says  the  sailor.  The  emigrant  entered 
the  fact  in  his  note-book:  with  a  wondering 
query  as  to  what  sort  of  stuff  this  Tom  Holt 
would  prove  to  be:  and  a  double-headed  proph- 
ecy that  it  would  prove  one  of  two  things: 
either  a  solid,  dull,  admirable  piece  of  truth, 
or  mere  ink  and  banditti.  Well,  the  emigrant 
was  wrong:  it  was  something  more  curious  than 
either,  for  it  was  a  work  by  Stephens  Hayward. 

Copyright,  1888,  1895,  by  Charles  Scribner's  Sons. 
138 


POPULAR  AUTHORS  139 


In  this  paper  I  propose  to  put  the  authors' 
names  in  capital  letters;  the  most  of  them  have 
not  much  hope  of  durable  renown;  their  day  is 
past,  the  poor  dogs — they  begin  swiftly  to  be 
forgotten;  and  Hayward  is  of  the  number. 
Yet  he  was  a  popular  writer;  and  what  is  really 
odd,  he  had  a  vein  of  hare-brained  merit.  There 
never  was  a  man  of  less  pretension;  the  intoxi- 
cating presence  of  an  ink-bottle,  which  was  too 
much  for  the  strong  head  of  Napoleon,  left 
him  sober  and  light-hearted;  he  had  no  shade 
of  literary  vanity;  he  was  never  at  the  trouble 
to  be  dull.  His  works  fell  out  of  date  in  the 
days  of  printing.  They  were  the  unhatched 
eggs  of  Arab  tales;  made  for  word-of -mouth 
recitation,  certain  (if  thus  told)  to  captivate  an 
audience  of  boys  or  any  simple  people — cer- 
tain, on  the  lips  of  a  generation  or  two  of  public 
story-tellers,  to  take  on  new  merit  and  become 
cherished  lore.  Such  tales  as  a  man,  such 
rather  as  a  boy,  tells  himself  at  night,  not  with- 
out smiling,  as  he  drops  asleep;  such,  with  the 
same  exhilarating  range  of  incident  and  the 
same  trifling  ingenuities,  with  no  more  truth 
to  experience  and  scarcely  more  cohesion, 
Hayward  told.    If  we  so  consider  The  Diamond 


140  LEARNING  TO  WRITE 

Necklace  or  the  Twenty  Captains,  which  is  what 
I  remember  best  of  Haywakd,  you  will  find  that 
staggering  narrative  grow  quite  conceivable. 

A  gentleman  (his  name  forgotten — Haywakd 
had  no  taste  in  names)  puts  an  advertisement 
in  the  papers,  inviting  nineteen  other  gentlemen 
to  join  him  in  a  likely  enterprise.  The  nine- 
teen appear  promptly,  nineteen,  no  more,  no 
less:  see  the  ease  of  the  recumbent  story-teller, 
half-asleep,  hanging  on  the  verge  of  that  coun- 
try of  dreams,  where  candles  come  alight  and 
journeys  are  accomplished  at  the  wishing! 
These  twenty,  all  total  strangers,  are  to  put 
their  money  together  and  form  an  association 
of  strict  equality:  hence  its  name — The  Twenty 
Captains.  And  it  is  no  doubt  very  pleasant  to 
be  equal  to  anybody,  even  in  name;  and  mighty 
desirable  (at  least  in  the  eyes  of  young  gentle- 
men hearing  this  tale  in  the  school  dormitory) 
to  be  called  captain,  even  in  private.  But  the 
deuce  of  it  is,  the  founder  has  no  enterprise  in 
view,  and  here  you  would  think,  the  least  wary 
capitalist  would  leave  his  chair,  and  buy  a 
broom  and  a  crossing  with  his  money,  rather 
than  place  it  in  the  hands  of  this  total  stranger, 
whose  mind  by  his  own  confession  was  a  blank, 
and  whose  real  name  was  probably  Macaire. 
No  such  matter  in  the  book.  With  the  ease  of 
dreaming,  the  association  is  founded;  and  again 


POPULAR  AUTHORS  141 

with  the  ease  of  dreaming  (Hayward  being 
now  three  parts  asleep)  the  enterprise,  in  the 
shape  of  a  persecuted  heiress  and  a  truly  dam- 
nable and  idiotic  aristocrat,  appears  upon  the 
scene.  For  some  time,  our  drowsy  story-teller 
dodges  along  upon  the  frontiers  of  incoherence, 
hardly  at  the  trouble  to  invent,  never  at  the 
trouble  to  write  literature;  but  suddenly  his 
interest  brightens  up,  he  sees  something  in 
front  of  him,  turns  on  the  pillow,  shakes  off  the 
tentacles  of  slumber,  and  puts  his  back  into  his 
tale.  Injured  innocence  takes  a  special  train 
to  Dover;  damnable  idiot  takes  another  and 
pursues;  the  twenty  captains  reach  the  station 
five  minutes  after,  and  demand  a  third.  It  is 
against  the  rules,  they  are  told;  not  more  than 
two  specials  (here  is  good  news  for  the  railway 
traveller)  are  allowed  at  the  same  time  upon 
the  line.  Is  injured  innocence,  with  her  dia- 
mond necklace,  to  lie  at  the  mercy  of  an  aris- 
tocrat? Forbid  it,  Heaven  and  the  Cheap 
Press!  The  twenty  captains  slip  unobserved 
into  the  engine-house,  steal  an  engine,  and 
forth  upon  the  Dover  line!  As  well  as  I  can 
gather,  there  were  no  stations  and  no  points- 
men on  this  route  to  Dover,  which  must  in 
consequence  be  quick  and  safe.  One  thing  it 
had  in  common  with  other  and  less  simple  rail- 
ways, it  had  a  line  of  telegraph  wires;  and  these 


i42  LEARNING  TO  WRITE 

the  twenty  captains  decided  to  destroy.  One 
of  them,  you  will  not  be  surprised  to  learn,  had  a 
coil  of  rope — in  his  pocket,  I  suppose;  another — 
again  I  shall  not  surprise  you — was  an  Irish- 
man and  given  to  blundering.  One  end  of  the 
line  was  made  fast  to  a  telegraph  post;  one  (by 
the  Irishman)  to  the  engine:  all  aboard — full 
steam  ahead — a  double  crash,  and  there  was 
the  telegraph  post  upon  the  ground,  and  here — 
mark  my  Hayward!  was  something  carried 
away  upon  the  engine.  All  eyes  turn  to  see 
what  it  is:  an  integral  part  of  the  machinery! 
There  is  now  no  means  of  reducing  speed;  on 
thunders  the  engine,  full  steam  ahead,  down 
this  remarkable  route  to  Dover;  on  speed  the 
twenty  captains,  not  very  easy  in  their  minds. 
Presently,  the  driver  of  the  second  special  (the 
aristocrats)  looks  behind  him,  sees  an  engine 
on  his  track,  signals,  signals  in  vain,  finds  him- 
self being  overhauled,  pokes  up  his  fire  and — 
full  steam  ahead  in  flight.  Presently  after,  the 
driver  of  the  first  special  (injured  innocence's) 
looks  behind,  sees  a  special  on  his  track  and  an 
engine  on  the  track  of  the  special,  signals,  sig- 
nals in  vain,  and  he  too — full  steam  ahead  in 
flight.  Such  a  day  on  the  Dover  line!  But 
at  last  the  second  special  smashes  into  the  first, 
and  the  engine  into  both;  and  for  my  part,  I 
think  there  was  an  end  of  that  romance.    But 


POPULAR  AUTHORS  143 

Hayward  was  by  this  time  fast  asleep:  not  a 
life  was  lost;  nor  only  that,  but  the  various  par- 
ties recovered  consciousness  and  resumed  then- 
wild  career  (only  now,  of  course,  on  foot  and 
across  country)  in  the  precise  original  order: 
injured  innocence  leading  by  a  length,  damna- 
ble aristocrat  with  still  more  damnable  valet 
(like  one  man)  a  good  second,  and  the  twenty 
captains  (again  like  one  man)  a  bad  third;  so 
that  here  was  the  story  going  on  again  just  as 
before,  and  this  appalling  catastrophe  on  the 
Dover  line  reduced  to  the  proportions  of  a 
morning  call.  The  feelings  of  the  company  (it 
is  true)  are  not  dwelt  upon. 

Now,  I  do  not  mean  that  Tom  Holt  is  quite 
such  high-flying  folly  as  The  Twenty  Captains; 
for  it  is  no  such  thing,  nor  half  so  entertaining. 
Still  it  flowed  from  the  same  irresponsible 
brain;  still  it  was  the  mere  drowsy  divagation 
of  a  man  in  bed,  now  tedious,  now  extravagant 
— always  acutely  untrue  to  life  as  it  is,  often 
pleasantly  coincident  with  childish  hopes  of 
what  life  ought  to  be — as  (for  instance)  in  the 
matter  of  that  little  pleasure-boat,  rigged,  to 
every  block  and  rope,  as  a  full-rigged  ship,  in 
which  Tom  goes  sailing — happy  child!  And 
this  was  the  work  that  an  actual  tarry  seaman 
recommended  for  a  picture  of  his  own  existence ! 


144  LEARNING  TO  WRITE 


n 

It  was  once  my  fortune  to  have  an  interview 
with  Mr.  Hayward's  publisher:  a  very  affable 
gentleman  in  a  very  small  office  in  a  shady 
court  off  Fleet  Street.  We  had  some  talk  to- 
gether of  the  works  he  issued  and  the  authors 
who  supplied  them;  and  it  was  strange  to  hear 
him  talk  for  all  the  world  as  one  of  our  pub- 
lishers might  have  talked  of  one  of  us,  only 
with  a  more  obliging  frankness,  so  that  the 
private  life  of  these  great  men  was  more  or 
less  unveiled  to  me.  So  and  so  (he  told  me, 
among  other  things)  had  demanded  an  advance 
upon  a  novel,  had  laid  out  the  sum  (apparently 
on  spirituous  drinks)  and  refused  to  finish  the 
work.  "We  had  to  put  it  in  the  hands  of 
Bracebridge  Hemming,"  said  the  publisher 
with  a  chuckle:  "he  finished  it."  And  then 
with  conviction:  "A  most  reliable  author, 
Bracebridge  Hemming."  I  have  no  doubt 
the  name  is  new  to  the  reader;  it  was  not  so  to 
me.  Among  these  great  men  of  the  dust,  there 
is  a  touching  ambition  which  punishes  itself; 
not  content  with  such  glory  as  comes  to  them, 
they  long  for  the  glory  of  being  bound — long  to 
invade,  between  six  boards,  the  homes  of  that 
aristocracy  whose  manners  they  so  often  find 


POPULAR  AUTHORS  145 

occasion  to  expose;  and  sometimes  (once  in  a 
long  lifetime)  the  gods  give  them  this  also,  and 
they  appear  in  the  orthodox  three  volumes, 
and  are  fleered  at  in  the  critical  press,  and  lie 
quite  unread  in  circulating  libraries.  One  such 
work  came  in  my  mind:  The  Bondage  of  Bran- 
don,  by  Bracebridge  Hemming.  I  had  not 
found  much  pleasure  in  the  volumes;  but  I  was 
the  more  glad  to  think  that  Mr.  Hemming's 
name  was  quite  a  household  word,  and  himself 
quoted  for  "a  reliable  author,"  in  his  own  liter- 
ary circles. 

On  my  way  westward  from  this  interview,  I 
was  aware  of  a  first  floor  in  Fleet  Street  rigged 
up  with  wire  window-blinds,  brass  straps,  and 
gilt  lettering:  Office  for  the  sale  of  the  works  of 
Pierce  Egan.  "Ay,  Mr.  Egan,"  thought  I, 
"and  have  you  an  office  all  to  yourself !"  And 
then  remembered  that  he  too  had  once  revelled 
in  three  volumes:  The  Flower  of  the  Flock  the 
book  was  called,  not  without  pathos  for  the 
considerate  mind;  but  even  the  flower  of  Egan's 
flock  was  not  good  enough  for  the  critics  or  the 
circulating  libraries,  so  that  I  purchased  my 
own  copy,  quite  unread,  for  three  shillings  at  a 
railway  bookstall.  Poor  dogs,  I  thought,  what 
ails  you,  that  you  should  have  the  desire  of 
this  fictitious  upper  popularity,  made  by  hack 
journalists  and  countersigned  by  yawning  girls? 


i46  LEARNING  TO  WRITE 

Yours  is  the  more  true.  Your  butcher,  the 
landlady  at  your  seaside  lodgings — if  you  can 
afford  that  indulgence,  the  barmaid  whom  you 
doubtless  court,  even  the  Rates  and  Taxes  that 
besiege  your  door,  have  actually  read  your 
tales  and  actually  know  your  names.  There 
was  a  waiter  once  (or  so  the  story  goes)  who 
knew  not  the  name  of  Tennyson:  that  of 
Hemming  perhaps  had  brought  the  light  into 
his  eyes,  or  Viles  perhaps,  or  Errym,  or  the 
great  J.  F.  Smith,  or  the  unutterable  Reynolds, 
to  whom  even  here  I  must  deny  his  capitals. — 
Fancy,  if  you  can  (thought  I),  that  I  languish 
under  the  reverse  of  your  complaint;  and  being 
an  upper-class  author,  bound  and  criticised, 
long  for  the  penny  number  and  the  weekly 
woodcut ! 

Well,  I  know  that  glory  now.  I  have  tried 
and  on  the  whole  I  have  failed:  just  as  Egan 
and  Hemming  failed  in  the  circulating  libraries. 
It  is  my  consolation  that  Charles  Reade  nearly 
wrecked  that  valuable  property  the  London 
Journal,  which  must  instantly  fall  back  on  Mr. 
Egan;  and  the  king  of  us  all,  George  Meredith, 
once  staggered  the  circulation  of  a  weekly  news- 
paper. A  servant-maid  used  to  come  and  boast 
when  she  had  read  another  chapter  of  Treasure 
Island:  that  any  pleasure  should  attend  the 
exercise  never  crossed  her  thoughts.    The  same 


POPULAR  AUTHORS  147 

tale,  in  a  penny  paper  of  a  high  class,  was 
mighty  coldly  looked  upon;  by  the  delicate 
test  of  the  correspondence  column,  I  could  see 
I  was  far  to  leeward;  and  there  was  one  giant 
on  the  staff  (a  man  with  some  talent,  when  he 
chose  to  use  it)  with  whom  I  very  early  per- 
ceived it  was  in  vain  to  rival.  Yet  I  was  thought 
well  of  on  my  penny  paper  for  two  reasons: 
one  that  the  publisher  was  bent  on  raising  the 
standard — a  difficult  enterprise  in  which  he  has 
to  a  great  extent  succeeded;  the  other,  because 
(like  Bracebridge  Hemming)  I  was  "a  reliable 
author."  For  our  great  men  of  the  dust  are 
apt  to  be  behind  with  copy. 

Ill 

How  I  came  to  be  such  a  student  of  our 
penny  press,  demands  perhaps  some  explana- 
tion. I  was  brought  up  on  CasselVs  Family 
Paper;  but  the  lady  who  was  kind  enough  to 
read  the  tales  aloud  to  me  was  subject  to  sharp 
attacks  of  conscience.  She  took  the  Family 
Paper  on  confidence;  the  tales  it  contained  being 
Family  Tales,  not  novels.  But  every  now  and 
then,  something  would  occur  to  alarm  her 
finer  sense;  she  would  express  a  well-grounded 
fear  that  the  current  fiction  was  "going  to  turn 
out  a  Regular  Novel";  and  the  family  paper, 


148  LEARNING  TO  WRITE 

with  my  pious  approval,  would  be  dropped. 
Yet  neither  she  nor  I  were  wholly  stoical;  and 
when  Saturday  came  round,  we  would  study 
the  windows  of  the  stationer  and  try  to  fish  out 
of  subsequent  woodcuts  and  their  legends  the 
further  adventures  of  our  favourites.  Many 
points  are  here  suggested  for  the  casuist; 
definitions  of  the  Regular  Novel  and  the  Fam- 
ily Tale  are  to  be  desired;  and  quite  a  paper 
might  be  written  on  the  relative  merit  of  read- 
ing a  fiction  outright  and  lusting  after  it  at  the 
stationer's  window.  The  experience  at  least 
had  a  great  effect  upon  my  childhood.  This 
inexpensive  pleasure  mastered  me.  Each  new 
Saturday  I  would  go  from  one  newsvender's 
window  to  another's,  till  I  was  master  of  the 
weekly  gallery  and  had  thoroughly  digested 
"The  Baronet  Unmasked,"  "So  and  so  ap- 
proaching the  Mysterious  House,"  "The  Dis- 
covery of  the  Dead  Body  in  the  Blue  Marl 
Pit,"  "Dr.  Vargas  Removing  the  Senseless  Body 
of  Fair  Lilias,"  and  whatever  other  snatch  of 
unknown  story  and  glimpse  of  unknown  char- 
acters that  gallery  afforded.  I  do  not  know 
that  I  ever  enjoyed  fiction  more;  those  books 
that  we  have  (in  such  a  way)  avoided  reading, 
are  all  so  excellently  written!  And  in  early 
years,  we  take  a  book  for  its  material,  and  act 
as  our  own  artists,  keenly  realising  that  which 


POPULAR  AUTHORS  149 

pleases  us,  leaving  the  rest  aside.  I  never  sup- 
posed that  a  book  was  to  command  me  until,  one 
disastrous  day  of  storm,  the  heaven  full  of  tur- 
bulent vapours,  the  streets  full  of  the  squalling 
of  the  gale,  the  windows  resounding  under 
bucketfuls  of  rain,  my  mother  read  aloud  to  me 
Macbeth.  I  cannot  say  I  thought  the  experi- 
ence agreeable;  I  far  preferred  the  ditch-water 
stories  that  a  child  could  dip  and  skip  and  doze 
over,  stealing  at  times  materials  for  play;  it  was 
something  new  and  shocking  to  be  thus  ravished 
by  a  giant,  and  I  shrank  under  the  brutal  grasp. 
But  the  spot  in  memory  is  still  sensitive;  nor  do 
I  ever  read  that  tragedy  but  I  hear  the  gale 
howling  up  the  valley  of  the  Leith. 

All  this  while,  I  would  never  buy  upon  my 
own  account;  pence  were  scarce,  conscience 
busy;  and  I  would  study  the  pictures  and  dip 
into  the  exposed  columns,  but  not  buy.  My 
fall  was  brought  about  by  a  tpily  romantic 
incident.  Perhaps  the  reader  knows  Neidpath 
Castle,  where  it  stands,  bosomed  in  hills,  on  a 
green  promontory;  Tweed  at  its  base  running 
through  all  the  gamut  of  a  busy  river,  from  the 
pouring  shallow  to  the  brown  pool.  In  the 
days  when  I  was  thereabout,  and  that  part  of 
the  earth  was  made  a  heaven  to  me  by  many 
things  now  lost,  by  boats,  and  bathing,  and  the 
fascination   of   streams,    and   the   delights   of 


150  LEARNING  TO  WRITE 

comradeship,  and  those  (surely  the  prettiest 
and  simplest)  of  a  boy  and  a  girl  romance — in 
those  days  of  Arcady  there  dwelt  in  the  upper 
story  of  the  castle  one  whom  I  believe  to  have 
been  gamekeeper  on  the  estate.  The  rest  of  the 
place  stood  open  to  incursive  urchins;  and 
there,  in  a  deserted  chamber,  we  found  some 
half-a-dozen  numbers  of  Black  Bess,  or  the 
Knight  of  the  Road,  a  work  by  Edward  Viles. 
So  far  as  we  were  aware,  no  one  had  visited  that 
chamber  (which  was  in  a  turret)  since  Lambert 
blew  in  the  doors  of  the  fortress  with  con- 
tumelious English  cannon.  Yet  it  could  hardly 
have  been  Lambert  (in  whatever  hurry  of  mili- 
tary operations)  who  had  left  these  samples  of 
romance;  and  the  idea  that  the  gamekeeper 
had  anything  to  do  with  them  was  one  that  we 
discouraged.  Well,  the  offence  is  now  covered 
by  prescription;  we  took  them  away;  and  in 
the  shade  of  a  contiguous  fir-wood,  lying  on 
blaeberries,  I  made  my  first  acquaintance  with 
the  art  of  Mr.  Viles.  From  this  author,  I  passed 
on  to  Malcolm  J.  Errym  (the  name,  to  my 
present  scrutiny,  suggesting  an  anagram  on 
Merry),  author  of  Edith  the  Captive,  The  Trea- 
sures of  St.  Mark,  A  Mystery  in  Scarlet,  George 
Barrington,  Sea-drift,  Townsend  the  Runner,  and 
a  variety  of  other  well-named  romances.  Mem- 
ory may  play  me  false,  but  I  believe  there  was 


POPULAR  AUTHORS  151 

a  kind  of  merit  about  Errym.  The  Mystery  in 
Scarlet  runs  in  my  mind  to  this  day;  and  if 
any  hunter  after  autographs  (and  I  think  the 
world  is  full  of  such)  can  lay  his  hands  on  a 
copy  even  imperfect,  and  will  send  it  to  me  in 
the  care  of  Messrs.  Scribner,  my  gratitude  (the 
muse  consenting)  will  even  drop  into  poetry. 
For  I  have  a  curiosity  to  know  what  the  Mys- 
tery in  Scarlet  was,  and  to  renew  acquaintance 
with  King  George  and  his  valet  Norris,  who 
were  the  chief  figures  in  the  work  and  may  be 
said  to  have  risen  in  every  page  superior  to 
history  and  the  ten  commandments.  Hence  I 
passed  on  to  Mr.  Egan,  whom  I  trust  the 
reader  does  not  confuse  with  the  author  of 
Tom  and  Jerry;  the  two  are  quite  distinct, 
though  I  have  sometimes  suspected  they  were 
father  and  son.  I  never  enjoyed  Egan  as  I  did 
Errym;  but  this  was  possibly  a  want  of  taste, 
and  Egan  would  do.  Thence  again  I  was 
suddenly  brought  face  to  face  with  Mr.  Rey- 
nolds. A  school-fellow,  acquainted  with  my 
debasing  tastes,  supplied  me  with  The  Mys- 
teries of  London,  and  I  fell  back  revolted.  The 
same  school-fellow  (who  seems  to  have  been  a 
devil  of  a  fellow)  supplied  me  about  the  same 
time  with  one  of  those  contributions  to  litera- 
ture (and  even  to  art)  from  which  the  name  of 
the  publisher  is  modestly  withheld.    It  was  a 


152  LEARNING  TO  WRITE 

far  more  respectable  work  than  The  Mysteries 
of  London.  J.  F.  Smith  when  I  was  a  child, 
Errym  when  I  was  a  boy,  Hayward  when  I 
had  attained  to  man's  estate,  these  I  read  for 
pleasure;  the  others,  down  to  Sylvanus  Cobb, 
I  have  made  it  my  business  to  know  (as  far  as 
my  endurance  would  support  me)  from  a  sin- 
cere interest  in  human  nature  and  the  art  of 
letters. 

IV 

What  kind  of  talent  is  required  to  please 
this  mighty  public?  that  was  my  first  question, 
and  was  soon  amended  with  the  words,  "if 
any."  J.  F.  Smith  was  a  man  of  undeniable 
talent,  Errym  and  Hayward  have  a  certain 
spirit,  and  even  in  Egan  the  very  tender  might 
recognise  the  rudiments  of  a  sort  of  literary 
gift;  but  the  cases  on  the  other  side  are  quite 
conclusive.  Take  Hemming,  or  the  dull  ruffian 
Reynolds,  or  Sylvanus  Cobb,  of  whom  perhaps 
I  have  only  seen  unfortunate  examples — they 
seem  not  to  have  the  talents  of  a  rabbit,  and 
why  anyone  should  read  them  is  a  thing  that 
passes  wonder.  A  plain-spoken  and  possibly 
high- thinking  critic  might  here  perhaps  return 
upon  me  with  my  own  expressions.  And  he 
would  have  missed  the  point.  For  I  and  my 
fellows  have  no  such  popularity  to  be  accounted 


POPULAR  AUTHORS  153 

for.  The  reputation  of  an  upper-class  author 
is  made  for  him  at  dinner-tables  and  nursed  in 
newspaper  paragraphs,  and  when  all  is  done, 
amounts  to  no  great  matter.  We  call  it  popu- 
larity, surely  in  a  pleasant  error.  A  flippant 
writer  in  the  Saturday  Review  expressed  a  doubt 
if  I  had  ever  cherished  a  "genteel"  illusion;  in 
truth  I  never  had  many,  but  this  was  one — 
and  I  have  lost  it.  Once  I  took  the  literary  au- 
thor at  his  own  esteem;  I  behold  him  now  like 
one  of  those  gentlemen  who  read  their  own  MS. 
descriptive  poetry  aloud  to  wife  and  babes 
around  the  evening  hearth;  addressing  a  mere 
parlour  coterie  and  quite  unknown  to  the  great 
world  outside  the  villa  windows.  At  such 
pigmy  reputation,  Reynolds,  or  Cobb,  or  Mrs. 
Southworih  can  afford  to  smile.  By  spontane- 
ous public  vote,  at  a  cry  from  the  unorganic 
masses,  these  great  ones  of  the  dust  were 
laurelled.    And  for  what? 

Ay,  there  is  the  question:  For  what?  How 
is  this  great  honour  gained  ?  Many  things  have 
been  suggested.  The  people  (it  has  been  said) 
like  rapid  narrative.  If  so,  the  taste  is  recent, 
for  both  Smith  and  Egan  were  leisurely  writers. 
It  has  been  said  they  like  incident,  not  char- 
acter. I  am  not  so  sure.  G.  P.  R.  James  was 
an  upper-class  author,  J.  F.  Smith  a  penny- 
pressman;  the  two  are  in  some  ways  not  unlike; 


154  LEARNING  TO  WRITE 

but — here  is  the  curiosity — James  made  far 
the  better  story,  Smith  was  far  the  more  suc- 
cessful with  his  characters.  Each  (to  bring  the 
parallel  home)  wrote  a  novel  called  The  Step- 
mother; each  introduced  a  pair  of  old  maids; 
and  let  anyone  study  the  result!  James's 
Stepmother  is  a  capital  tale,  but  Smith's  old 
maids  are  like  Trollope  at  his  best.  It  is  said 
again  that  the  people  like  crime.  Certainly 
they  do.  But  the  great  ones  of  the  dust  have 
no  monopoly  of  that,  and  their  less  fortunate 
rivals  hammer  away  at  murder  and  abduction 
unapplauded. 

I  return  to  linger  about  my  seaman  on  the 
Atlantic  liner.  I  shall  be  told  he  is  exceptional. 
I  am  tempted  to  think,  on  the  other  hand,  that 
he  may  be  normal.  The  critical  attitude, 
whether  to  books  or  life — how  if  that  were  the 
true  exception?  How  if  Tom  Holt's  Log,  sur- 
reptitiously perused  by  a  harbour-side,  had  been 
the  means  of  sending  my  mariner  to  sea  ?  How 
if  he  were  still  unconsciously  expecting  the 
Tom  Holt  part  of  the  business  to  begin — per- 
haps to-morrow?  How,  even,  if  he  had  never 
yet  awakened  to  the  discrepancy  between  that 
singular  picture  and  the  facts?  Let  us  take 
another  instance.  The  Young  Ladies'  Journal  is 
an  elegant  miscellany  which  I  have  frequently 
observed  in  the  possession  of  the  barmaid.    In 


POPULAR  AUTHORS  155 

a  lone  house  on  a  moorland,  I  was  once  supplied 
with  quite  a  considerable  file  of  this  production 
and  (the  weather  being  violent)  devoutly  read  it. 
The  tales  were  not  ill  done;  they  were  well 
abreast  of  the  average  tale  in  a  circulating  li- 
brary; there  was  only  one  difference,  only  one 
thing  to  remind  me  I  was  in  the  land  of  penny 
numbers  instead  of  the  parish  of  three  volumes: 
Disguise  it  as  the  authors  pleased  (and  they 
showed  ingenuity  in  doing  so)  it  was  always 
the  same  tale  they  must  relate:  the  tale  of  a 
poor  girl  ultimately  married  to  a  peer  of  the 
realm  or  (at  the  worst)  a  baronet.  The  circum- 
stance is  not  common  in  life;  but  how  familiar 
to  the  musings  of  the  barmaid !  The  tales  were 
not  true  to  what  men  see;  they  were  true  to 
what  the  readers  dreamed. 

Let  us  try  to  remember  how  fancy  works  in 
children;  with  what  selective  partiality  it  reads, 
leaving  often  the  bulk  of  the  book  unrealised, 
but  fixing  on  the  rest  and  living  it;  and  what  a 
passionate  impotence  it  shows — what  power  of 
adoption,  what  weakness  to  create.  It  seems 
to  be  not  much  otherwise  with  uneducated 
readers.  They  long,  not  to  enter  into  the  lives 
of  others,  but  to  behold  themselves  in  changed 
situations,  ardently  but  impotently  precon- 
ceived. The  imagination  (save  the  mark!)  of 
the  popular  author  here  comes  to  the  rescue, 


i56  LEARNING  TO  WRITE 

supplies  some  body  of  circumstance  to  these 
phantom  aspirations,  and  conducts  the  readers 
where  they  will.  Where  they  will:  that  is  the 
point;  elsewhere  they  will  not  follow.  When  I 
was  a  child,  if  I  came  on  a  book  in  which  the 
characters  wore  armour,  it  fell  from  my  hand; 
I  had  no  criterion  of  merit,  simply  that  one 
decisive  taste,  that  my  fancy  refused  to  linger 
in  the  middle  ages.  And  the  mind  of  the  un- 
educated reader  is  mailed  with  similar  restric- 
tions. So  it  is  that  we  must  account  for  a  thing 
otherwise  unaccountable;  the  popularity  of 
some  of  these  great  ones  of  the  dust.  In  de- 
fect of  any  other  gift,  they  have  instinctive 
sympathy  with  the  popular  mind.  They  can 
thus  supply  to  the  shop-girl  and  the  shoe-black 
vesture  cut  to  the  pattern  of  their  naked  fancies, 
and  furnish  them  with  welcome  scenery  and 
properties  for  autobiographical  romancing. 

Even  in  readers  of  an  upper  class,  we  may 
perceive  the  traces  of  a  similar  hesitation;  even 
for  them,  a  writer  may  be  too  exotic.  The 
villain,  even  the  heroine,  may  be  a  Feejee  isl- 
ander, but  only  on  condition  the  hero  is  one 
of  ourselves.  It  is  pretty  to  see  the  thing  re- 
versed in  the  Arabian  tale  (Torrens  or  Burton — 
the  tale  is  omitted  in  popular  editions)  where 
the  Moslem  hero  carries  off  the  Christian 
amazon;  and  in  the  exogamous  romance,  there 


POPULAR  AUTHORS  157 

lies  interred  a  good  deal  of  human  history  and 
human  nature.  But  the  question  of  exogamy 
is  foreign  to  the  purpose.  Enough  that  we  are 
not  readily  pleased  without  a  character  of  our 
own  race  and  language;  so  that,  when  the  scene 
of  a  romance  is  laid  on  any  distant  soil,  we  look 
with  eagerness  and  confidence  for  the  coming 
of  the  English  traveller.  With  the  readers  of 
the  penny-press,  the  thing  goes  further.  Burn- 
ing as  they  are  to  penetrate  into  the  homes  of 
the  peerage,  they  must  still  be  conducted  there 
by  some  character  of  their  own  class,  into  whose 
person  they  cheerfully  migrate  for  the  time  of 
reading.  Hence  the  poor  governesses  supplied 
in  the  Young  Ladies9  Journal.  Hence  these 
dreary  virtuous  ouvriers  and  ouvrieres  of  Xavier 
de  Montepin.  He  can  do  nothing  with  them; 
and  he  is  far  too  clever  not  to  be  aware  of  that. 
When  he  writes  for  the  Figaro,  he  discards  these 
venerable  puppets  and  doubtless  glories  in 
their  absence;  but  so  soon  as  he  must  address 
the  great  audience  of  the  half-penny  journal, 
out  come  the  puppets,  and  are  furbished  up, 
and  take  to  drink  again,  and  are  once  more  re- 
claimed, and  once  more  falsely  accused.  See 
them  for  what  they  are — Montepin's  decoys; 
without  these  he  could  not  make  his  public  feel 
at  home  in  the  houses  of  the  fraudulent  bankers 
and  the  wicked  dukes. 


158  LEARNING  TO  WRITE 

The  reader,  it  has  been  said,  migrates  into 
such  characters  for  the  time  of  reading;  under 
their  name  escapes  the  narrow  prison  of  the 
individual  career,  and  sates  his  avidity  for  other 
lives.  To  what  extent  he  ever  emigrates  again, 
and  how  far  the  fancied  careers  react  upon 
the  true  one,  it  would  fill  another  paper  to  de- 
bate. But  the  case  of  my  sailor  shows  their 
grave  importance.  "Tom  Holt  does  not  apply 
to  me,"  thinks  our  dully-imaginative  boy  by 
the  harbour-side,  "for  I  am  not  a  sailor.  But 
if  I  go  to  sea  it  will  apply  completely.,,  And 
he  does  go  to  sea.  He  lives  surrounded  by  the 
fact,  and  does  not  observe  it.  He  cannot  real- 
ise, he  cannot  make  a  tale  of  his  own  life;  which 
crumbles  in  discrete  impressions  even  as  he 
lives  it,  and  slips  between  the  fingers  of  his 
memory  like  sand.  It  is  not  this  that  he  con- 
siders in  his  rare  hours  of  rumination,  but  that 
other  life,  which  was  all  lit  up  for  him  by  the 
humble  talent  of  a  Hayward — that  other  life 
which,  God  knows,  perhaps  he  still  believes 
that  he  is  leading — the  life  of  Tom  Holt. 


X 

SOME  GENTLEMEN  IN  FICTION 

To  make  a  character  at  all — so  to  select,  so 
to  describe  a  few  acts,  a  few  speeches,  perhaps 
(though  this  is  quite  superfluous)  a  few  details 
of  physical  appearance,  as  that  these  shall  all 
cohere  and  strike  in  the  readers  mind  a  com- 
mon note  of  personality — there  is  no  more  deli- 
cate enterprise,  success  is  nowhere  less  compre- 
hensible than  here.  We  meet  a  man,  we  find 
his  talk  to  have  been  racy;  and  yet  if  every 
word  were  taken  down  by  shorthand,  we  should 
stand  amazed  at  its  essential  insignificance. 
Physical  presence,  the  speaking  eye,  the  in- 
imitable commentary  of  the  voice,  it  was  in 
these  the  spell  resided;  and  these  are  all  ex- 
cluded from  the  pages  of  the  novel.  There  is 
one  writer  of  fiction  whom  I  have  the  advantage 
of  knowing;  and  he  confesses  to  me  that  his 
success  in  this  matter  (small  though  it  be)  is 
quite  surprising  to  himself.  "In  one  of  my 
books,"  he  writes,  "and  in  one  only,  the  char- 
acters took  the  bit  in  their  mouth;  all  at  once, 

Copyright,  1888,  1895,  by  Charles  Scribner's  Sons. 
i59 


i6o  LEARNING  TO  WRITE 

they  became  detached  from  the  flat  paper,  they 
turned  their  backs  on  me  and  walked  off  bodily; 
and  from  that  time,  my  task  was  stenographic — 
it  was  they  who  spoke,  it  was  they  who  wrote 
the  remainder  of  the  story.  When  this  miracle 
of  genesis  occurred,  I  was  thrilled  with  joyous 
surprise;  I  felt  a  certain  awe — shall  we  call  it 
superstitious?  And  yet  how  small  a  miracle  it 
was;  with  what  a  partial  life  were  my  char- 
acters endowed;  and  when  all  was  said,  how 
little  did  I  know  of  them!  It  was  a  form  of 
words  that  they  supplied  me  with;  it  was  in  a 
form  of  words  that  they  consisted;  beyond  and 
behind  was  nothing."  The  limitation,  which 
this  writer  felt  and  which  he  seems  to  have 
deplored,  can  be  remarked  in  the  work  of  even 
literary  princes.  I  think  it  was  Hazlitt  who 
declared  that,  if  the  names  were  dropped  at 
press,  he  could  restore  any  speech  in  Shakespeare 
to  the  proper  speaker;  and  I  dare  say  we  could 
all  pick  out  the  words  of  Nym  or  Pistol,  Caius 
or  Evans;  but  not  even  Hazlitt  could  do  the 
like  for  the  great  leading  characters,  who  yet  are 
cast  in  a  more  delicate  mould,  and  appear  before 
us  far  more  subtly  and  far  more  fully  differen- 
tiated, than  these  easy-going  ventriloquial  pup- 
pets. It  is  just  when  the  obvious  expedients  of 
the  barrel-organ  vocabulary,  the  droll  mispro- 
nunciation or  the  racy  dialect,  are  laid  aside, 


SOME  GENTLEMEN  IN  FICTION    161 

that  the  true  masterpieces  are  wrought  (it 
would  seem)  from  nothing.  Hamlet  speaks  in 
character,  I  potently  believe  it,  and  yet  see  not 
how.  He  speaks  at  least  as  no  man  ever  spoke 
in  life,  and  very  much  as  many  other  heroes  do 
in  the  same  volume;  now  uttering  the  noblest 
verse,  now  prose  of  the  most  cunning  workman- 
ship; clothing  his  opinions  throughout  in  that 
amazing  dialect,  Shakespearese.  The  opinions 
themselves,  again,  though  they  are  true  and 
forcible  and  reinforced  with  excellent  images,  are 
not  peculiar  either  to  Hamlet,  or  to  any  man  or 
class  or  period;  in  their  admirable  generality  of 
appeal  resides  their  merit;  they  might  figure, 
and  they  would  be  applauded,  in  almost  any 
play  and  in  the  mouth  of  almost  any  noble  and 
considerate  character.  The  only  hint  that  is 
given  as  to  his  physical  man — I  speak  for  myself 
— is  merely  shocking,  seems  merely  erroneous, 
and  is  perhaps  best  explained  away  upon  the 
theory  that  Shakespeare  had  Burbadge  more 
directly  in  his  eye  than  Hamlet.  As  for  what 
the  Prince  does  and  what  he  refrains  from  do- 
ing, all  acts  and  passions  are  strangely  imper- 
sonal. A  thousand  characters,  as  different 
among  themselves  as  night  from  day,  should 
yet,  under  the  like  stress  of  circumstance,  have 
trodden  punctually  in  the  footprints  of  Hamlet 
and  each  other.     Have  you  read  Andre  Cor- 


i62  LEARNING  TO  WRITE 

nelis  t  in  which  M.  Bourget  handled  over  again 
but  yesterday  the  theme  of  Hamlet,  even  as 
Godwin  had  already  rehandled  part  of  it  in 
Caleb  Williams.  You  can  see  the  character  M. 
Bourget  means  with  quite  sufficient  clearness; 
it  is  not  a  masterpiece,  but  it  is  adequately  in- 
dicated; and  the  character  is  proper  to  the 
part,  these  acts  and  passions  fit  him  like  a 
glove,  he  carries  the  tale,  not  with  so  good  a 
grace  as  Hamlet,  but  with  equal  nature.  Well, 
the  two  personalities  are  fundamentally  dis- 
tinct: they  breathe  upon  us  out  of  different 
worlds;  in  face,  in  touch,  in  the  subtile  atmos- 
phere by  which  we  recognise  an  individual,  in 
all  that  goes  to  build  up  a  character — or  at 
least  that  shadowy  thing,  a  character  in  a  book 
— they  are  even  opposed:  the  same  fate  involves 
them,  they  behave  on  the  same  lines,  and  they 
have  not  one  hair  in  common.  What,  then, 
remains  of  Hamlet?  and  by  what  magic  does 
he  stand  forth  in  our  brains,  teres  atque  rotundus, 
solid  to  the  touch,  a  man  to  praise,  to  blame,  to 
pity,  ay,  and  to  love? 

At  bottom,  what  we  hate  or  love  is  doubtless 
some  projection  of  the  author;  the  personal  at- 
mosphere is  doubtless  his;  and  when  we  think 
we  know  Hamlet,  we  know  but  a  side  of  his 
creator.  It  is  a  good  old  comfortable  doctrine, 
which  our  fathers  have  taken  for  a  pillow,  which 


SOME  GENTLEMEN  IN  FICTION    163 

has  served  as  a  cradle  for  ourselves;  and  yet,  in 
some  of  its  applications,  it  brings  us  face  to  face 
with  difficulties.  I  said  last  month  that  we 
could  tell  a  gentleman  in  a  novel.  Let  us  con- 
tinue to  take  Hamlet.  Manners  vary,  they  in- 
vert themselves,  from  age  to  age;  Shakespeare's 
gentlemen  are  not  quite  ours,  there  is  no  doubt 
their  talk  would  raise  a  flutter  in  a  modern  tea- 
party;  but  in  the  old  pious  phrase,  they  have 
the  root  of  the  matter.  All  the  most  beautiful 
traits  of  the  gentleman  adorn  this  character  of 
Hamlet:  it  was  the  side  on  which  Salvini  seized, 
which  he  so  attractively  displayed,  with  which 
he  led  theatres  captive;  it  is  the  side,  I  think, 
by  which  the  Prince  endears  himself  to  readers. 
It  is  true  there  is  one  staggering  scene,  the  great 
scene  with  his  mother.  But  we  must  regard 
this  as  the  author's  lost  battle;  here  it  was  that 
Shakespeare  failed:  what  to  do  with  the  Queen, 
how  to  depict  her,  how  to  make  Hamlet  use 
her,  these  (as  we  know)  were  his  miserable 
problem;  it  beat  him,  he  faced  it  with  an  in- 
decision worthy  of  his  hero;  he  shifted,  he 
shuffled  with  it;  in  the  end,  he  may  be  said  to 
have  left  his  paper  blank.  One  reason  why  we 
do  not  more  generally  recognise  this  failure  of 
Shakespeare's  is  because  we  have  most  of  us 
seen  the  play  performed;  and  managers,  by 
what  seems  a  stroke  of  art,  by  what  is  really 


164  LEARNING  TO  WRITE 

(I  dare  say)  a  fortunate  necessity,  smuggle  the 
problem  out  of  sight — the  play,  too,  for  the 
matter  of  that;  but  the  glamour  of  the  foot- 
lights and  the  charm  of  that  little  strip  of 
fiddlers'  heads  and  elbows,  conceal  the  conjur- 
ing. This  stroke  of  art  (let  me  call  it  so)  con- 
sists in  casting  the  Queen  as  an  old  woman. 
Thanks  to  the  footlights  and  the  fiddlers' 
heads,  we  never  pause  to  inquire  why  the  King 
should  have  pawned  his  soul  for  this  college- 
bedmaker  in  masquerade;  and  thanks  to  the 
absurdity  of  the  whole  position,  and  that  un- 
conscious unchivalry  of  audiences  (ay,  and  of 
authors  also)  to  old  women,  Hamlet's  mon- 
strous conduct  passes  unobserved  or  unresented. 
Were  the  Queen  cast  as  she  should  be,  a  woman 
still  young  and  beautiful,  had  she  been  coher- 
ently written  by  Shakespeare,  and  were  she 
played  with  any  spirit,  even  an  audience  would 
rise. 

But  the  scene  is  simply  false,  effective  on  the 
stage,  untrue  of  any  son  or  any  mother;  in 
judging  the  character  of  Hamlet,  it  must  be 
left  upon  one  side;  and  in  all  other  relations  we 
recognise  the  Prince  for  a  gentleman. 

Now,  if  the  personal  charm  of  any  verbal 
puppet  be  indeed  only  an  emanation  from  its 
author,  may  we  conclude,  since  we  feel  Hamlet 
to  be  a  gentleman,  that  Shakespeare  was  one 


SOME  GENTLEMEN  IN  FICTION    165 

too?  An  instructive  parallel  occurs.  There 
were  in  England  two  writers  of  fiction,  con- 
temporaries, rivals  in  fame,  opposites  in  char- 
acter; one  descended  from  a  great  house,  easy, 
generous,  witty,  debauched,  a  favourite  in  the 
tap-room  and  the  hunting  field,  yet  withal  a 
man  of  a  high  practical  intelligence,  a  distin- 
guished public  servant,  an  ornament  of  the 
bench:  the  other,  sprung  from  I  know  not 
whence — but  not  from  kings — buzzed  about  by 
second-rate  women,  and  their  fit  companion,  a 
tea-bibber  in  parlours,  a  man  of  painful  pro- 
priety, with  all  the  narrowness  and  much  of 
the  animosity  of  the  backshop  and  the  dissent- 
ing chapel.  Take  the  pair,  they  seem  like  types: 
Fielding,  with  all  his  faults,  was  undeniably  a 
gentleman;  Richardson,  with  all  his  genius  and 
his  virtues,  as  undeniably  was  not.  And  now 
turn  to  their  works.  In  Tom  Jones,  a  novel  of 
which  the  respectable  profess  that  they  could 
stand  the  dulness  if  it  were  not  so  blackguardly, 
and  the  more  honest  admit  they  could  forgive 
the  blackguardism  if  it  were  not  so  dull — in 
Tom  Jones,  with  its  voluminous  bulk  and 
troops  of  characters,  there  is  no  shadow  of  a 
gentleman,  for  Allworthy  is  only  ink  and 
paper.  In  Joseph  Andrews,  I  fear  I  have  al- 
ways confined  my  reading  to  the  parson;  and 
Mr.  Adams,  delightful  as  he  is,  has  no  pre- 


166  LEARNING  TO  WRITE 

tension  "to  the  genteel."  In  Amelia ,  things 
get  better;  all  things  get  better;  it  is  one  of  the 
curiosities  of  literature  that  Fielding,  who  wrote 
one  book  that  was  engaging,  truthful,  kind,  and 
clean,  and  another  book  that  was  dirty,  dull, 
and  false,  should  be  spoken  of,  the  world  over, 
as  the  author  of  the  second  and  not  the  first,  as 
the  author  of  Tom  Jones,  not  of  Amelia.  And 
in  Amelia,  sure  enough,  we  find  some  gentle- 
folk; Booth  and  Dr.  Harrison  will  pass  in  a 
crowd,  I  dare  not  say  they  will  do  more.  It  is 
very  differently  that  one  must  speak  of  Rich- 
ardson's creations.  With  Sir  Charles  Grandison 
I  am  unacquainted — there  are  many  impedi- 
ments in  this  brief  life  of  man;  I  have  more  than 
once,  indeed,  reconnoitred  the  first  volume  with 
a  flying  party,  but  always  decided  not  to  break 
ground  before  the  place  till  my  siege  guns  came 
up;  and  it's  an  odd  thing — I  have  been  all 
these  years  in  the  field,  and  that  powerful  ar- 
tillery is  still  miles  in  the  rear.  The  day  it 
overtakes  me,  Baron  Gibbon's  fortress  shall 
be  beat  about  his  ears,  and  my  flag  be  planted 
on  the  formidable  ramparts  of  the  second  part 
of  Faust.  Clarendon,  too —  But  why  should  I 
continue  this  confession?  Let  the  reader  take 
up  the  wondrous  tale  himself,  and  run  over  the 
books  that  he  has  tried,  and  failed  withal,  and 
vowed  to  try  again,  and  now  beholds,  as  he 


SOME  GENTLEMEN  IN  FICTION    167 

goes  about  a  library,  with  secret  compunction. 
As  to  Sir  Charles  at  least,  I  have  the  report  of 
spies;  and  by  the  papers  in  the  office  of  my  In- 
telligence Department,  it  would  seem  he  was  a 
most  accomplished  baronet.  I  am  the  more 
ready  to  credit  these  reports,  because  the  spies 
are  persons  thoroughly  accustomed  to  the  busi- 
ness; and  because  my  own  investigation  of  a 
kindred  quarter  of  the  globe  (Clarissa  Earlowe) 
has  led  me  to  set  a  high  value  on  the  Richard- 
sonians.  Lovelace — in  spite  of  his  abominable 
misbehaviour — Colonel  Morden  and  my  Lord 

M are  all  gentlemen  of  undisputed  quality. 

They  more  than  pass  muster,  they  excel;  they 
have  a  gallant,  a  conspicuous  carriage;  they 
roll  into  the  book,  four  in  hand,  in  gracious  at- 
titudes.   The  best  of  Fielding's  gentlemen  had 

scarce  been  at  their  ease  in  M Hall;  Dr. 

Harrison  had  seemed  a  plain,  honest  man,  a 
trifle  below  his  company;  and  poor  Booth  (sup- 
posing him  to  have  served  in  Colonel  Morden's 
corps  and  to  have  travelled  in  the  post-chaise 
along  with  his  commandant)  had  been  glad  to 
slink  away  with  Mowbray  and  crack  a  bottle  in 
the  butler's  room. 

So  that  here,  on  the  terms  of  our  theory,  we 
have  an  odd  inversion,  tempting  to  the  cynic. 


168  LEARNING  TO  WRITE 


n  * 

Just  the  other  day,  there  were  again  two 
rival  novelists  in  England:  Thackeray  and 
Dickens;  and  the  case  of  the  last  is,  in  this  con- 
nection, full  of  interest.  Here  was  a  man  and 
an  artist,  the  most  strenuous,  one  of  the  most 
endowed;  and  for  how  many  years  he  laboured 
in  vain  to  create  a  gentleman!  With  all  his 
watchfulness  of  men  and  manners,  with  all  his 
fiery  industry,  with  his  exquisite  native  gift  of 
characterisation,  with  his  clear  knowledge  of 
what  he  meant  to  do,  there  was  yet  something 
lacking.  In  part  after  part,  novel  after  novel, 
a  whole  menagerie  of  characters,  the  good,  the 
bad,  the  droll  and  the  tragic,  came  at  his  beck 
like  slaves  about  an  oriental  despot;  there  was 
only  one  who  stayed  away:  the  gentleman.  If 
this  ill  fortune  had  persisted  it  might  have 
shaken  man's  belief  in  art  and  industry.  But 
years  were  given  and  courage  was  continued  to 
the  indefatigable  artist;  and  at  length,  after  so 
many  and  such  lamentable  failures,  success  be- 
gan to  attend  upon  his  arms.  David  Copper- 
field  scrambled  through  on  hands  and  knees;  it 
was  at  least  a  negative  success;  and  Dickens, 
keenly  alive  to  all  he  did,  must  have  heaved  a 
sigh  of  infinite  relief.    Then  came  the  evil  days, 


SOME  GENTLEMEN  IN  FICTION    169 

the  days  of  Donibey  and  Dorrit,  from  which 
the  lover  of  Dickens  willingly  averts  his  eyes; 
and  when  that  temporary  blight  had  passed 
away,  and  the  artist  began  with  a  more  reso- 
lute arm  to  reap  the  aftermath  of  his  genius,  we 
find  him  able  to  create  a  Carton,  a  Wrayburn, 
a  Twemlow.  No  mistake  about  these  three; 
they  are  all  gentlemen:  the  sottish  Carton,  the 
effete  Twemlow,  the  insolent  Wrayburn,  all 
have  doubled  the  cape. 

There  were  never  in  any  book  three  perfect 
sentences  on  end;  there  was  never  a  character 
in  any  volume  but  it  somewhere  tripped.  We 
are  like  dancing  dogs  and  preaching  women: 
the  wonder  is  not  that  we  should  do  it  well, 
but  that  we  should  do  it  at  all.  And  Wray- 
burn, I  am  free  to  admit,  comes  on  one  oc- 
casion to  the  dust.  I  mean,  of  course,  the 
scene  with  the  old  Jew.  I  will  make  you  a  pres- 
ent of  the  Jew  for  a  card-board  figure;  but  that 
is  neither  here  nor  there:  the  ineffectuality  of 
the  one  presentment  does  not  mitigate  the 
grossness,  the  baseness,  the  inhumanity  of  the 
other.  In  this  scene,  and  in  one  other  (if  I  re- 
member aright)  where  it  is  echoed,  Wrayburn 
combines  the  wit  of  the  omnibus-cad  with  the 
good  feeling  of  the  Andaman  Islander:  in  all 
the  remainder  of  the  book,  throughout  a  thou- 
sand perils,  playing  (you  would  say)  with  diffi- 


iyo  LEARNING  TO  WRITE 

culty,  the  author  swimmingly  steers  his  hero 
on  the  true  course.  The  error  stands  by  itself, 
and  it  is  striking  to  observe  the  moment  of  its 
introduction.  It  follows  immediately  upon  one 
of  the  most  dramatic  passages  in  fiction,  that 
in  which  Bradley  Headstone  barks  his  knuckles 
on  the  church-yard  wall.  To  handle  Bradley 
(one  of  Dickens's  superlative  achievements)  were 
a  thing  impossible  to  almost  any  man  but  his 
creator;  and  even  to  him,  we  may  be  sure,  the 
effort  was  exhausting.  Dickens  was  a  weary 
man  when  he  had  barked  the  school-master's 
knuckles,  a  weary  man  and  an  excited;  but  the 
tale  of  bricks  had  to  be  finished,  the  monthly 
number  waited;  and  under  the  false  inspiration 
of  irritated  nerves,  the  scene  of  Wrayburn  and 
the  Jew  was  written  and  sent  forth;  and  there 
it  is,  a  blot  upon  the  book  and  a  buffet  to  the 
reader. 

I  make  no  more  account  of  this  passage  than 
of  that  other  in  Hamlet:  a  scene  that  has  broken 
down,  the  judicious  reader  cancels  for  himself. 
And  the  general  tenor  of  Wrayburn,  and  the 
whole  of  Carton  and  Twemlow,  are  beyond  ex- 
ception. Here,  then,  we  have  a  man  who  found 
it  for  years  an  enterprise  beyond  his  art  to 
draw  a  gentleman,  and  who  in  the  end  suc- 
ceeded.   Is  it  because  Dickens  was  not  a  gentle- 


SOME  GENTLEMEN  IN  FICTION    171 

man  himself  that  he  so  often  failed?  and  if 
so,  then  how  did  he  succeed  at  last?  Is  it  be- 
cause he  was  a  gentleman  that  he  succeeded? 
and  if  so,  what  made  him  fail?  I  feel  inclined 
to  stop  this  paper  here,  after  the  manner  of 
conundrums,  and  offer  a  moderate  reward  for  a 
solution.  But  the  true  answer  lies  probably 
deeper  than  did  ever  plummet  sound.  And 
mine  (such  as  it  is)  will  hardly  appear  to  the 
reader  to  disturb  the  surface. 

These  verbal  puppets  (so  to  call  them  once 
again)  are  things  of  a  divided  parentage:  the 
breath  of  life  may  be  an  emanation  from  their 
maker,  but  they  themselves  are  only  strings  of 
words  and  parts  of  books;  they  dwell  in,  they 
belong  to,  literature;  convention,  technical  ar- 
tifice, technical  gusto,  the  mechanical  neces- 
sities of  the  art,  these  are  the  flesh  and  blood 
with  which  they  are  invested.  If  we  look  only  at 
Carton  and  Wrayburn,  both  leading  parts,  it 
must  strike  us  at  once  that  both  are  most  am- 
bitiously attempted;  that  Dickens  was  not  con- 
tent to  draw  a  hero  and  a  gentleman  plainly 
and  quietly;  that,  after  all  his  ill-success,  he 
must  still  handicap  himself  upon  these  fresh 
adventures,  and  make  Carton  a  sot,  and  some- 
times a  cantankerous  sot,  and  Wrayburn  in- 
solent to  the  verge,  and  sometimes  beyond  the 


172  LEARNING  TO  WRITE 

verge,  of  what  is  pardonable.  A  moment's 
thought  will  show  us  this  was  in  the  nature  of 
his  genius,  and  a  part  of  his  literary  method. 
His  fierce  intensity  of  design  was  not  to  be 
slaked  with  any  academic  portraiture;  not  all 
the  arts  of  individualisation  could  perfectly 
content  him;  he  must  still  seek  something  more 
definite  and  more  express  than  nature.  All 
artists,  it  may  be  properly  argued,  do  the  like; 
it  is  their  method  to  discard  the  middling  and 
the  insignificant,  to  disengage  the  charactered 
and  the  precise.  But  it  is  only  a  class  of  artists 
that  pursue  so  singly  the  note  of  personality; 
and  is  it  not  possible  that  such  a  preoccupation 
may  disable  men  from  representing  gentlefolk? 
The  gentleman  passes  in  the  stream  of  the 
day's  manners,  inconspicuous.  The  lover  of  the 
individual  may  find  him  scarce  worth  drawing. 
And  even  if  he  draw  him,  on  what  will  his  at- 
tention centre  but  just  upon  those  points  in 
which  his  model  exceeds  or  falls  short  of  his 
subdued  ideal — but  just  upon  those  points  in 
which  the  gentleman  is  not  genteel?  Dickens, 
in  an  hour  of  irritated  nerves,  and  under  the 
pressure  of  the  monthly  number,  defaced  his 
Wrayburn.  Observe  what  he  sacrifices.  The 
ruling  passion  strong  in  his  hour  of  weakness, 
he   sacrifices   dignity,    decency,    the   essential 


SOME  GENTLEMEN  IN  FICTION    173 

human  beauties  of  his  hero;  he  still  preserves 
the  dialect,  the  shrill  note  of  personality,  the 
mark  of  identification.  Thackeray,  under  the 
strain  of  the  same  villainous  system,  would 
have  fallen  upon  the  other  side;  his  gentleman 
would  still  have  been  a  gentleman,  he  would 
have  only  ceased  to  be  an  individual  figure. 

There  are  incompatible  ambitions.    You  can- 
not paint  a  Vandyke  and  keep  it  a  Franz  Hals. 


Ill 

I  have  preferred  to  conclude  my  inconclu- 
sive argument  before  I  touched  on  Thackeray. 
Personally,  he  scarce  appeals  to  us  as  the  ideal 
gentleman;  if  there  were  nothing  else,  per- 
petual nosing  after  snobbery  at  least  suggests 
the  snob;  but  about  the  men  he  made,  there 
can  be  no  such  question  of  reserve.  And  whether 
because  he  was  himself  a  gentleman  in  a  very 
high  degree,  or  because  his  methods  were  in  a 
very  high  degree  suited  to  this  class  of  work,  or 
from  the  common  operation  of  both  causes,  a 
gentleman  came  from  his  pen  by  the  gift  of 
nature.  He  could  draw  him  as  a  character 
part,  full  of  pettiness,  tainted  with  vulgarity, 
and  yet  still  a  gentleman,  in  the  inimitable 
Major  Pendennis.    He  could  draw  him  as  the 


i74  LEARNING  TO  WRITE 

full-blown  hero  in  Colonel  Esmond.  He  could 
draw  him — the  next  thing  to  the  work  of  God 
— human  and  true  and  noble  and  frail,  in  Col- 
onel Newcome.  If  the  art  of  being  a  gentle- 
man were  forgotten,  like  the  art  of  staining 
glass,  it  might  be  learned  anew  from  that  one 
character.  It  is  learned  there,  I  dare  to  say, 
daily.  Mr.  Andrew  Lang,  in  a  graceful  attitude 
of  melancholy,  denies  the  influence  of  books.  I 
think  he  forgets  his  philosophy;  for  surely  there 
go  two  elements  to  the  determination  of  con- 
duct: heredity,  and  experience — that  which  is 
given  to  us  at  birth,  that  which  is  added  and 
cancelled  in  the  course  of  life;  and  what  experi- 
ence is  more  formative,  what  step  of  life  is  more 
efficient,  than  to  know  and  weep  for  Colonel 
Newcome?  And  surely  he  forgets  himself;  for 
I  call  to  mind  other  pages,  beautiful  pages,  from 
which  it  may  be  gathered  that  the  language  of 
the  Newcomes  sings  still  in  his  memory,  and  its 
gospel  is  sometimes  not  forgotten.  I  call  it  a 
gospel:  it  is  the  best  I  know.  Error  and  suffer- 
ing and  failure  and  death,  those  calamities  that 
our  contemporaries  paint  upon  so  vast  a  scale 
— they  are  all  depicted  here,  but  in  a  more  true 
proportion.  We  may  return,  before  this  pic- 
ture, to  the  simple  and  ancient  faith.  We  may 
be  sure  (although  we  know  not  why)  that  we 


SOME  GENTLEMEN  IN  FICTION    175 

give  our  lives,  like  coral  insects,  to  build  up  in- 
sensibly, in  the  twilight  of  the  seas  of  time,  the 
reef  of  righteousness.  And  we  may  be  sure 
(although  we  see  not  how)  it  is  a  thing  worth 
doing. 


XI 

A   CHAPTER  ON  DREAMS 

The  past  is  all  of  one  texture — whether 
feigned  or  suffered — whether  acted  out  in  three 
dimensions,  or  only  witnessed  in  that  small 
theatre  of  the  brain  which  we  keep  brightly 
lighted  all  night  long,  after  the  jets  are  down, 
and  darkness  and  sleep  reign  undisturbed  in  the 
remainder  of  the  body.  There  is  no  distinction 
on  the  face  of  our  experiences;  one  is  vivid  in- 
deed, and  one  dull,  and  one  pleasant,  and  another 
agonising  to  remember;  but  which  of  them  is 
what  we  call  true,  and  which  a  dream,  there  is 
not  one  hair  to  prove.  The  past  stands  on  a 
precarious  footing;  another  straw  split  in  the 
field  of  metaphysic,  and  behold  us  robbed  of  it. 
There  is  scarce  a  family  that  can  count  four 
generations  but  lays  a  claim  to  some  dormant 
title  or  some  castle  and  estate:  a  claim  not 
prosecutable  in  any  court  of  law,  but  flattering 
to  the  fancy  and  a  great  alleviation  of  idle 
hours.  A  man's  claim  to  his  own  past  is  yet 
less  valid.  A  paper  might  turn  up  (in  proper 
story-book  fashion)  in  the  secret  drawer  of  an 
176 


A  CHAPTER  ON  DREAMS        177 

old  ebony  secretary,  and  restore  your  family  to 
its  ancient  honours,  and  reinstate  mine  in  a 
certain  West  Indian  islet  (not  far  from  St. 
Kitt's,  as  beloved  tradition  hummed  in  my 
young  ears)  which  was  once  ours,  and  is  now 
unjustly  someone  else's,  and  for  that  matter 
(in  the  state  of  the  sugar  trade)  is  not  worth 
anything  to  anybody.  I  do  not  say  that  these 
revolutions  are  likely;  only  no  man  can  deny 
that  they  are  possible;  and  the  past,  on  the 
other  hand,  is  lost  forever:  our  old  days  and 
deeds,  our  old  selves,  too,  and  the  very  world  in 
which  these  scenes  were  acted,  all  brought  down 
to  the  same  faint  residuum  as  a  last  night's 
dream,  to  some  incontinuous  images,  and  an 
echo  in  the  chambers  of  the  brain.  Not  an 
hour,  not  a  mood,  not  a  glance  of  the  eye,  can 
we  revoke;  it  is  all  gone,  past  conjuring.  And 
yet  conceive  us  robbed  of  it,  conceive  that  little 
thread  of  memory  that  we  trail  behind  us  broken 
at  the  pocket's  edge;  and  in  what  naked  nullity 
should  we  be  left !  for  we  only  guide  ourselves, 
and  only  know  ourselves,  by  these  air-painted 
pictures  of  the  past. 

Upon  these  grounds,  there  are  some  among  us 
who  claimed  to  have  lived  longer  and  more 
richly  than  their  neighbours;  when  they  lay 
asleep  they  claim  they  were  still  active;  and 
among  the  treasures  of  memory  that  all  men 


178  LEARNING  TO  WRITE 

review  for  their  amusement,  these  count  in  no 
second  place  the  harvests  of  their  dreams. 
There  is  one  of  this  kind  whom  I  have  in  my 
eye,  and  whose  case  is  perhaps  unusual  enough 
to  be  described.  He  was  from  a  child  an  ardent 
and  uncomfortable  dreamer.  When  he  had  a 
touch  of  fever  at  night,  and  the  room  swelled 
and  shrank,  and  his  clothes,  hanging  on  a  nail, 
now  loomed  up  instant  to  the  bigness  of  a 
church,  and  now  drew  away  into  a  horror  of 
infinite  distance  and  infinite  littleness,  the  poor 
soul  was  very  well  aware  of  what  must  follow, 
and  struggled  hard  against  the  approaches  of 
that  slumber  which  was  the  beginning  of  sor- 
rows. But  his  struggles  were  in  vain;  sooner  or 
later  the  night-hag  would  have  him  by  the 
throat,  and  pluck  him,  strangling  and  scream- 
ing, from  his  sleep.  His  dreams  were  at  times 
commonplace  enough,  at  times  very  strange:  at 
times  they  were  almost  formless,  he  would  be 
haunted,  for  instance,  by  nothing  more  definite 
than  a  certain  hue  of  brown,  which  he  did  not 
mind  in  the  least  while  he  was  awake,  but 
feared  and  loathed  while  he  was  dreaming;  at 
times,  again,  they  took  on  every  detail  of  cir- 
cumstance, as  when  once  he  supposed  he  must 
swallow  the  populous  world,  and  awoke  scream- 
ing with  the  horror  of  the  thought.  The  two 
chief  troubles  of  his  very  narrow  existence — the 


A  CHAPTER  ON  DREAMS        179 

practical  and  everyday  trouble  of  school  tasks 
and  the  ultimate  and  airy  one  of  hell  and  judg- 
ment— were  often  confounded  together  into  one 
appalling  nightmare.  He  seemed  to  himself  to 
stand  before  the  Great  White  Throne;  he  was 
called  on,  poor  little  devil,  to  recite  some  form 
of  words,  on  which  his  destiny  depended;  his 
tongue  stuck,  his  memory  was  blank,  hell  gaped 
for  him;  and  he  would  awake,  clinging  to  the 
curtain-rod  with  his  knees  to  his  chin. 

These  were  extremely  poor  experiences,  on  the 
whole;  and  at  that  time  of  life  my  dreamer 
would  have  very  willingly  parted  with  his 
power  of  dreams.  But  presently,  in  the  course 
of  his  growth,  the  cries  and  physical  contortions 
passed  away,  seemingly  forever;  his  visions 
were  still  for  the  most  part  miserable,  but  they 
were  more  constantly  supported;  and  he  would 
awake  with  no  more  extreme  symptom  than  a 
flying  heart,  a  freezing  scalp,  cold  sweats,  and 
the  speechless  midnight  fear.  His  dreams,  too, 
as  befitted  a  mind  better  stocked  with  par- 
ticulars, became  more  circumstantial,  and  had 
more  the  air  and  continuity  of  life.  The  look 
of  the  world  beginning  to  take  hold  on  his  at- 
tention, scenery  came  to  play  a  part  in  his 
sleeping  as  well  as  in  his  waking  thoughts,  so 
that  he  would  take  long,  uneventful  journeys 
and  see  strange  towns  and  beautiful  places  as 


180  LEARNING  TO  WRITE 

he  lay  in  bed.  And,  what  is  more  significant, 
an  odd  taste  that  he  had  for  the  Georgian  cos- 
tume and  for  stories  laid  in  that  period  of  Eng- 
lish history,  began  to  rule  the  features  of  his 
dreams;  so  that  he  masqueraded  there  in  a 
three-cornered  hat,  and  was  much  engaged 
with  Jacobite  conspiracy  between  the  hour  for 
bed  and  that  for  breakfast.  About  the  same 
time,  he  began  to  read  in  his  dreams — tales,  for 
the  most  part,  and  for  the  most  part  after  the 
manner  of  G.  P.  R.  James,  but  so  incredibly 
more  vivid  and  moving  than  any  printed  book, 
that  he  has  ever  since  been  malcontent  with 
literature. 

And  then,  while  he  was  yet  a  student,  there 
came  to  him  a  dream-adventure  which  he  has 
no  anxiety  to  repeat;  he  began,  that  is  to  say, 
to  dream  in  sequence  and  thus  to  lead  a  double 
life — one  of  the  day,  one  of  the  night — one  that 
he  had  every  reason  to  believe  was  the  true 
one,  another  that  he  had  no  means  of  proving 
to  be  false.  I  should  have  said  he  studied,  or 
was  by  way  of  studying,  at  Edinburgh  College, 
which  (it  may  be  supposed)  was  how  I  came  to 
know  him.  Well,  in  his  dream  life,  he  passed  a 
long  day  in  the  surgical  theatre,  his  heart  in  his 
mouth,  his  teeth  on  edge,  seeing  monstrous 
malformations  and  the  abhorred  dexterity  of 
surgeons.    In  a  heavy,  rainy,  foggy  evening  he 


A  CHAPTER  ON  DREAMS        181 

came  forth  into  the  South  Bridge,  turned  up  the 
High  Street,  and  entered  the  door  of  a  tall  land, 
at  the  top  of  which  he  supposed  himself  to  lodge. 
All  night  long,  in  his  wet  clothes,  he  climbed  the 
stairs,  stair  after  stair  in  endless  series,  and  at 
every  second  flight  a  flaring  lamp  with  a  re- 
flector. All  night  long,  he  brushed  by  single 
persons  passing  downward — beggarly  women  of 
the  street,  great,  weary,  muddy  labourers,  poor 
scarecrows  of  men,  pale  parodies  of  women — 
but  all  drowsy  and  weary  like  himself,  and  all 
single,  and  all  brushing  against  him  as  they 
passed.  In  the  end,  out  of  a  northern  window, 
he  would  see  day  beginning  to  whiten  over  the 
Firth,  give  up  the  ascent,  turn  to  descend,  and 
in  a  breath  be  back  again  upon  the  streets,  in 
his  wet  clothes,  in  the  wet,  haggard  dawn, 
trudging  to  another  day  of  monstrosities  and 
operations.  Time  went  quicker  in  the  life  of 
dreams,  some  seven  hours  (as  near  as  he  can 
guess)  to  one;  and  it  went,  besides,  more  in- 
tensely, so  that  the  gloom  of  these  fancied  ex- 
periences clouded  the  day,  and  he  had  not 
shaken  off  their  shadow  ere  it  was  time  to  lie 
down  and  to  renew  them.  I  cannot  tell  how 
long  it  was  that  he  endured  this  discipline;  but 
it  was  long  enough  to  leave  a  great  black  blot 
upon  his  memory,  long  enough  to  send  him, 
trembling  for  his  reason,  to  the  doors  of  a  certain 


182  LEARNING  TO  WRITE 

doctor;  whereupon  with  a  simple  draught  he  was 
restored  to  the  common  lot  of  man. 

The  poor  gentleman  has  since  been  troubled 
by  nothing  of  the  sort;  indeed,  his  nights  were 
for  some  while  like  other  men's,  now  blank,  now 
chequered  with  dreams,  and  these  sometimes 
charming,  sometimes  appalling,  but  except  for 
an  occasional  vividness,  of  no  extraordinary 
kind.  I  will  just  note  one  of  these  occasions, 
ere  I  pass  on  to  what  makes  my  dreamer  truly 
interesting.  It  seemed  to  him  that  he  was  in 
the  first  floor  of  a  rough  hill-farm.  The  room 
showed  some  poor  efforts  at  gentility,  a  carpet 
on  the  floor,  a  piano,  I  think,  against  the  wall; 
but,  for  all  these  refinements,  there  was  no  mis- 
taking he  was  in  a  moorland  place,  among 
hillside  people,  and  set  in  miles  of  heather.  He 
looked  down  from  the  window  upon  a  bare 
farmyard,  that  seemed  to  have  been  long  dis- 
used. A  great,  uneasy  stillness  lay  upon  the 
world.  There  was  no  sign  of  the  farm-folk  or 
of  any  live  stock,  save  for  an  old,  brown,  curly 
dog  of  the  retriever  breed,  who  sat  close  in 
against  the  wall  of  the  house  and  seemed  to  be 
dozing.  Something  about  this  dog  disquieted 
the  dreamer;  it  was  quite  a  nameless  feeling,  for 
the  beast  looked  right  enough — indeed,  he  was 
so  old  and  dull  and  dusty  and  broken-down, 
that  he  should  rather  have  awakened  pity;  and 


A  CHAPTER  ON  DREAMS        183 

yet  the  conviction  came  and  grew  upon  the 
dreamer  that  this  was  no  proper  dog  at  all,  but 
something  hellish.  A  great  many  dozing  sum- 
mer flies  hummed  about  the  yard;  and  presently 
the  dog  thrust  forth  his  paw,  caught  a  fly  in  his 
open  palm,  carried  it  to  his  mouth  like  an  ape, 
and  looking  suddenly  up  at  the  dreamer  in  the 
window,  winked  to  him  with  one  eye.  The 
dream  went  on,  it  matters  not  how  it  went;  it 
was  a  good  dream  as  dreams  go;  but  there  was 
nothing  in  the  sequel  worthy  of  that  devilish 
brown  dog.  And  the  point  of  interest  for  me 
lies  partly  in  that  very  fact:  that  having  found 
so  singular  an  incident,  my  imperfect  dreamer 
should  prove  unable  to  carry  the  tale  to  a  fit 
end  and  fall  back  on  indescribable  noises  and 
indiscriminate  horrors.  It  would  be  different 
now;  he  knows  his  business  better ! 

For,  to  approach  at  last  the  point:  This  hon- 
est fellow  had  long  been  in  the  custom  of  set- 
ting himself  to  sleep  with  tales,  and  so  had  his 
father  before  him;  but  these  were  irresponsible 
inventions,  told  for  the  teller's  pleasure,  with 
no  eye  to  the  crass  public  or  the  thwart  reviewer: 
tales  where  a  thread  might  be  dropped,  or  one 
adventure  quitted  for  another,  on  fancy's  least 
suggestion.  So  that  the  little  people  who  man- 
age man's  internal  theatre  had  not  as  yet  re- 
ceived a  very  rigorous  training;  and  played 


184  LEARNING  TO  WRITE 

upon  their  stage  like  children  who  should  have 
slipped  into  the  house  and  found  it  empty, 
rather  than  like  drilled  actors  performing  a  set 
piece  to  a  huge  hall  of  faces.  But  presently  my 
dreamer  began  to  turn  his  former  amusement 
of  story- telling  to  (what  is  called)  account;  by 
which  I  mean  that  he  began  to  write  and  sell 
his  tales.  Here  was  he,  and  here  were  the  little 
people  who  did  that  part  of  his  business,  in 
quite  new  conditions.  The  stories  must  now 
be  trimmed  and  pared  and  set  upon  all  fours, 
they  must  run  from  a  beginning  to  an  end  and 
fit  (after  a  manner)  with  the  laws  of  life;  the 
pleasure,  in  one  word,  had  become  a  business; 
and  that  not  only  for  the  dreamer,  but  for  the 
little  people  of  his  theatre.  These  understood 
the  change  as  well  as  he.  When  he  lay  down  to 
prepare  himself  for  sleep,  he  no  longer  sought 
amusement,  but  printable  and  profitable  tales; 
and  after  he  had  dozed  off  in  his  box-seat,  his 
little  people  continued  their  evolutions  with  the 
same  mercantile  designs.  All  other  forms  of 
dream  deserted  him  but  two:  he  still  occasion- 
ally reads  the  most  delightful  books,  he  still 
visits  at  times  the  most  delightful  places;  and 
it  is  perhaps  worthy  of  note  that  to  these  same 
places,  and  to  one  in  particular,  he  returns  at 
intervals  of  months  and  years,  finding  new 
field-paths,  visiting  new  neighbours,  beholding 


A  CHAPTER  ON  DREAMS        185 

that  happy  valley  under  new  effects  of  noon  and 
dawn  and  sunset.  But  all  the  rest  of  the  family 
of  visions  is  quite  lost  to  him:  the  common, 
mangled  version  of  yesterday's  affairs,  the  raw- 
head-and-bloody-bones  nightmare,  rumoured  to 
be  the  child  of  toasted  cheese — these  and  their 
like  are  gone;  and,  for  the  most  part,  whether 
awake  or  asleep,  he  is  simply  occupied — he  or 
his  little  people — in  consciously  making  stories 
for  the  market.  This  dreamer  (like  many  other 
persons)  has  encountered  some  trifling  vicissi- 
tudes of  fortune.  When  the  bank  begins  to  send 
letters  and  the  butcher  to  linger  at  the  back 
gate,  he  sets  to  belabouring  his  brains  after  a 
story,  for  that  is  his  readiest  money- winner;  and, 
behold !  at  once  the  little  people  begin  to  bestir 
themselves  in  the  same  quest,  and  labour  all 
night  long,  and  all  night  long  set  before  him 
truncheons  of  tales  upon  their  lighted  theatre. 
No  fear  of  his  being  frightened  now;  the  flying 
heart  and  the  frozen  scalp  are  things  bygone; 
applause,  growing  applause,  growing  interest, 
growing  exultation  in  his  own  cleverness  (for 
he  takes  all  the  credit),  and  at  last  a  jubilant 
leap  to  wakefulness,  with  the  cry,  "I  have  it, 
that'll  do !"  upon  his  lips:  with  such  and  similar 
emotions  he  sits  at  these  nocturnal  dramas, 
with  such  outbreaks,  like  Claudius  in  the  play, 
he  scatters  the  performance  in  the  midst.  Often 


186  LEARNING  TO  WRITE 

enough  the  waking  is  a  disappointment:  he  has 
been  too  deep  asleep,  as  I  explain  the  thing; 
drowsiness  has  gained  his  little  people,  they 
have  gone  stumbling  and  maundering  through 
their  parts;  and  the  play,  to  the  awakened  mind, 
is  seen  to  be  a  tissue  of  absurdities.  And  yet 
how  often  have  these  sleepless  Brownies  done 
him  honest  service,  and  given  him,  as  he  sat 
idly  taking  his  pleasure  in  the  boxes,  better 
tales  than  he  could  fashion  for  himself. 

Here  is  one,  exactly  as  it  came  to  him.  It 
seemed  he  was  the  son  of  a  very  rich  and 
wicked  man,  the  owner  of  broad  acres  and  a 
most  damnable  temper.  The  dreamer  (and 
that  was  the  son)  had  lived  much  abroad,  on 
purpose  to  avoid  his  parent;  and  when  at  length 
he  returned  to  England,  it  was  to  find  him 
married  again  to  a  young  wife,  who  was  sup- 
posed to  suffer  cruelly  and  to  loathe  her  yoke. 
Because  of  this  marriage  (as  the  dreamer  in- 
distinctly understood)  it  was  desirable  for 
father  and  son  to  have  a  meeting;  and  yet  both 
being  proud  and  both  angry,  neither  would  con- 
descend upon  a  visit.  Meet  they  did  accord- 
ingly, in  a  desolate,  sandy  country  by  the  sea; 
and  there  they  quarrelled,  and  the  son,  stung  by 
some  intolerable  insult,  struck  down  the  father 
dead.  No  suspicion  was  aroused;  the  dead 
man  was  found  and  buried,  and  the  dreamer 


A  CHAPTER  ON  DREAMS        187 

succeeded  to  the  broad  estates,  and  found  him- 
self installed  under  the  same  roof  with  his 
father's  widow,  for  whom  no  provision  had  been 
made.  These  two  lived  very  much  alone,  as 
people  may  after  a  bereavement,  sat  down  to 
table  together,  shared  the  long  evenings,  and 
grew  daily  better  friends;  until  it  seemed  to 
him  of  a  sudden  that  she  was  prying  about 
dangerous  matters,  that  she  had  conceived  a 
notion  of  his  guilt,  that  she  watched  him  and 
tried  him  with  questions.  He  drew  back  from 
her  company  as  men  draw  back  from  a  precipice 
suddenly  discovered;  and  yet  so  strong  was  the 
attraction  that  he  would  drift  again  and  again 
into  the  old  intimacy,  and  again  and  again  be 
startled  back  by  some  suggestive  question  or 
some  inexplicable  meaning  in  her  eye.  So  they 
lived  at  cross  purposes,  a  life  full  of  broken 
dialogue,  challenging  glances,  and  suppressed 
passion;  until,  one  day,  he  saw  the  woman 
slipping  from  the  house  in  a  veil,  followed  her 
to  the  station,  followed  her  in  the  train  to  the 
seaside  country,  and  out  over  the  sandhills  to 
the  very  place  where  the  murder  was  done. 
There  she  began  to  grope  among  the  bents,  he 
watching  her,  flat  upon  his  face;  and  presently 
she  had  something  in  her  hand — I  cannot  re- 
member what  it  was,  but  it  was  deadly  evidence 
against  the  dreamer — and  as  she  held  it  up  to 


188  LEARNING  TO  WRITE 

look  at  it,  perhaps  from  the  shock  of  the  dis- 
covery, her  foot  slipped,  and  she  hung  at  some 
peril  on  the  brink  of  the  tall  sand- wreaths.  He 
had  no  thought  but  to  spring  up  and  rescue 
her;  and  there  they  stood  face  to  face,  she  with 
that  deadly  matter  openly  in  her  hand — his 
very  presence  on  the  spot  another  link  of 
proof.  It  was  plain  she  was  about  to  speak, 
but  this  was  more  than  he  could  bear — he  could 
bear  to  be  lost,  but  not  to  talk  of  it  with  his 
destroyer;  and  he  cut  her  short  with  trivial 
conversation.  Arm  in  arm,  they  returned  to- 
gether to  the  train,  talking  he  knew  not  what, 
made  the  journey  back  in  the  same  carriage, 
sat  down  to  dinner,  and  passed  the  evening  in 
the  drawing-room  as  in  the  past.  But  suspense 
and  fear  drummed  in  the  dreamer's  bosom. 
"She  has  not  denounced  me  yet" — so  his 
thoughts  ran — "when  will  she  denounce  me? 
Will  it  be  to-morrow?"  And  it  was  not  to- 
morrow, nor  the  next  day,  nor  the  next;  and 
their  life  settled  back  on  the  old  terms,  only 
that  she  seemed  kinder  than  before,  and  that, 
as  for  him,  the  burthen  of  his  suspense  and 
wonder  grew  daily  more  unbearable,  so  that  he 
wasted  away  like  a  man  with  a  disease.  Once, 
indeed,  he  broke  all  bounds  of  decency,  seized 
an  occasion  when  she  was  abroad,  ransacked 
her  room,  and  at  last,  hidden  away  among  her 


A  CHAPTER  ON  DREAMS        189 

jewels,  found  the  damning  evidence.  There  he 
stood,  holding  this  thing,  which  was  his  life, 
in  the  hollow  of  his  hand,  and  marvelling  at 
her  inconsequent  behaviour,  that  she  should 
seek,  and  keep,  and  yet  not  use  it;  and  then  the 
door  opened,  and  behold  herself.  So,  once 
more,  they  stood,  eye  to  eye,  with  the  evidence 
between  them;  and  once  more  she  raised  to 
him  a  face  brimming  with  some  communication; 
and  once  more  he  shied  away  from  speech  and 
cut  her  off.  But  before  he  left  the  room,  which 
he  had  turned  upside  down,  he  laid  back  his 
death-warrant  where  he  had  found  it;  and  at 
that,  her  face  lighted  up.  The  next  thing  he 
heard,  she  was  explaining  to  her  maid,  with 
some  ingenious  falsehood,  the  disorder  of  her 
things.  Flesh  and  blood  could  bear  the  strain 
no  longer;  and  I  think  it  was  the  next  morning 
(though  chronology  is  always  hazy  in  the  thea- 
tre of  the  mind)  that  he  burst  from  his  reserve. 
They  had  been  breakfasting  together  in  one 
corner  of  a  great,  parqueted,  sparely-furnished 
room  of  many  windows;  all  the  time  of  the  meal 
she  had  tortured  him  with  sly  allusions;  and  no 
sooner  were  the  servants  gone,  and  these  two 
protagonists  alone  together,  than  he  leaped  to 
his  feet.  She  too  sprang  up,  with  a  pale  face; 
with  a  pale  face,  she  heard  him  as  he  raved  out 
his  complaint:  Why  did  she  torture  him  so? 


190  LEARNING  TO  WRITE 

she  knew  all,  she  knew  he  was  no  enemy  to  her; 
why  did  she  not  denounce  him  at  once?  what 
signified  her  whole  behaviour  ?  why  did  she  tor- 
ture him?  and  yet  again,  why  did  she  torture 
him?  And  when  he  had  done,  she  fell  upon  her 
knees,  and  with  outstretched  hands:  "Do  you 
not  understand ?"  she  cried.    "I  love  you!" 

Hereupon,  with  a  pang  of  wonder  and  mer- 
cantile delight,  the  dreamer  awoke.  His  mer- 
cantile delight  was  not  of  long  endurance;  for 
it  soon  became  plain  that  in  this  spirited  tale 
there  were  unmarketable  elements;  which  is 
just  the  reason  why  you  have  it  here  so  briefly 
told.  But  his  wonder  has  still  kept  growing; 
and  I  think  the  reader's  will  also,  if  he  con- 
sider it  ripely.  For  now  he  sees  why  I  speak 
of  the  little  people  as  of  substantive  inventors 
and  performers.  To  the  end  they  had  kept 
their  secret.  I  will  go  bail  for  the  dreamer 
(having  excellent  grounds  for  valuing  his  can- 
dour) that  he  had  no  guess  whatever  at  the 
motive  of  the  woman — the  hinge  of  the  whole 
well-invented  plot — until  the  instant  of  that 
highly  dramatic  declaration.  It  was  not  his 
tale;  it  was  the  little  people's!  And  observe: 
not  only  was  the  secret  kept,  the  story  was  told 
with  really  guileful  craftsmanship.  The  con- 
duct of  both  actors  is  (in  the  cant  phrase) 
psychologically  correct,  and  the  emotion  aptly 


A  CHAPTER  ON  DREAMS        191 

graduated  up  to  the  surprising  climax.  I  am 
awake  now,  and  I  know  this  trade;  and  yet  I 
cannot  better  it.  I  am  awake,  and  I  live  by  this 
business;  and  yet  I  could  not  outdo — could  not 
perhaps  equal — that  crafty  artifice  (as  of  some 
old,  experienced  carpenter  of  plays,  some  Den- 
nery  or  Sardou)  by  which  the  same  situation  is 
twice  presented  and  the  two  actors  twice 
brought  face  to  face  over  the  evidence,  only 
once  it  is  in  her  hand,  once  in  his — and  these 
in  their  due  order,  the  least  dramatic  first. 
The  more  I  think  of  it,  the  more  I  am  moved 
to  press  upon  the  world  my  question:  Who  are 
the  Little  People?  They  are  near  connections 
of  the  dreamer's,  beyond  doubt;  they  share  in 
his  financial  worries  and  have  an  eye  to  the 
bank-book;  they  share  plainly  in  his  training; 
they  have  plainly  learned  like  him  to  build  the 
scheme  of  a  considerate  story  and  to  arrange 
emotion  in  progressive  order;  only  I  think  they 
have  more  talent;  and  one  thing  is  beyond 
doubt,  they  can  tell  him  a  story  piece  by  piece, 
like  a  serial,  and  keep  him  all  the  while  in  igno- 
rance of  where  they  aim.  Who  are  they,  then? 
and  who  is  the  dreamer? 

Well,  as  regards  the  dreamer,  I  can  answer 
that,  for  he  is  no  less  a  person  than  myself; — 
as  I  might  have  told  you  from  the  beginning, 
only  that  the  critics  murmur  over  my  consis- 


i92  LEARNING  TO  WRITE 

tent  egotism; — and  as  I  am  positively  forced 
to  tell  you  now,  or  I  could  advance  but  little 
farther  with  my  story.  sAnd  for  the  Little  Peo- 
ple, what  shall  I  say  they  are  but  just  my 
Brownies,  God  bless  them !  who  do  one-half 
my  work  for  me  while  I  am  fast  asleep,  and  in 
all  human  likelihood,  do  the  rest  for  me  as 
well,  when  I  am  wide  awake  and  fondly  suppose 
I  do  it  for  myself.*  That  part  which  is  done 
while  I  am  sleeping  is  the  Brownies'  part  be- 
yond contention;  but  that  which  is  done  when 
I  am  up  and  about  is  by  no  means  necessarily 
mine,  since  all  goes  to  show  the  Brownies  have 
a  hand  in  it  even  then.  Here  is  a  doubt  that 
much  concerns  my  conscience.  For  myself — 
what  I  call  I,  my  conscience  ego,  the  denizen 
of  the  pineal  gland  unless  he  has  changed  his 
residence  since  Descartes,  the  man  with  the  con- 
science and  the  variable  bank-account,  the  man 
with  the  hat  and  the  boots,  and  the  privilege  of 
voting  and  not  carrying  his  candidate  at  the 
general  elections — I  am  sometimes  tempted  to 
suppose  he  is  no  story-teller  at  all,  but  a  crea- 
ture as  matter  of  fact  as  any  cheesemonger  or 
any  cheese,  and  a  realist  bemired  up  to  the  ears 
in  actuality;  so  that,  by  that  account,  the  whole 
of  my  published  fiction  should  be  the  single- 
handed  product  of  some  Brownie,  some  Familiar, 
some  unseen  collaborator,  whom  I  keep  locked 


A  CHAPTER  ON  DREAMS        193 

in  a  back  garret,  while  I  get  all  the  praise  and 
he  but  a  share  (which  I  cannot  prevent  him 
getting)  of  the  pudding.  I  am  an  excellent 
adviser,  something  like  Moliere's  servant;  I  pull 
back  and  I  cut  down;  and  I  dress  the  whole  in 
the  best  words  and  sentences  that  I  can  find 
and  make;  I  hold  the  pen,  too;  and  I  do  the 
sitting  at  the  table,  which  is  about  the  worst  of 
it;  and  when  all  is  done,  I  make  up  the  manu- 
script and  pay  for  the  registration;  so  that,  on 
the  whole,  I  have  some  claim  to  share,  though 
not  so  largely  as  I  do,  in  the  profits  of  our  com- 
mon enterprise. 

I  can  but  give  an  instance  or  so  of  what  part 
is  done  sleeping  and  what  part  awake,  and 
leave  the  reader  to  share  what  laurels  there 
are,  at  his  own  nod,  between  myself  and  my 
collaborators;  and  to  do  this  I  will  first  take  a 
book  that  a  number  of  persons  have  been  polite 
enough  to  read,  the  Strange  Case  of  Dr.  Jekyll 
and  Mr.  Hyde.  I  had  long  been  trying  to  write 
a  story  on  this  subject,  to  find  a  body,  a  vehicle, 
for  that  strong  sense  of  man's  double  being 
which  must  at  times  come  in  upon  and  over- 
whelm the  mind  of  every  thinking  creature.  I 
had  even  written  one,  The  Travelling  Compan- 
ion, which  was  returned  by  an  editor  on  the 
plea  that  it  was  a  work  of  genius  and  indecent, 
and  which  I  burned  the  other  day  on  the  ground 


i94  LEARNING  TO  WRITE 

that  it  was  not  a  work  of  genius,  and  that  Jekyll 
had  supplanted  it.  Then  came  one  of  those 
financial  fluctuations  to  which  (with  an  elegant 
modesty)  I  have  hitherto  referred  in  the  third 
person.  For  two  days  I  went  about  racking  my 
brains  for  a  plot  of  any  sort;  and  on  the  second 
night  I  dreamed  the  scene  at  the  window,  and 
a  scene  afterwards  split  in  two,  in  which  Hyde, 
pursued  for  some  crime,  took  the  powder  and 
underwent  the  change  in  the  presence  of  his 
pursuers.  All  the  rest  was  made  awake,  and 
consciously,  although  I  think  I  can  trace  in 
much  of  it  the  manner  of  my  Brownies.  The 
meaning  of  the  tale  is  therefore  mine,  and  had 
long  pre-existed  in  my  garden  of  Adonis,  and 
tried  one  body  after  another  in  vain;  indeed,  I 
do  most  of  the  morality,  worse  luck !  and  my 
Brownies  have  not  a  rudiment  of  what  we  call 
a  conscience.  Mine,  too,  is  the  setting,  mine 
the  characters.  All  that  was  given  me  was  the 
matter  of  three  scenes,  and  the  central  idea  of  a 
;  voluntary  change  becoming  involuntary.  Will 
it  be  thought  ungenerous,  after  I  have  been  so 
liberally  ladling  out  praise  to  my  unseen  col- 
laborators, if  I  here  toss  them  over,  bound 
hand  and  foot,  into  the  arena  of  the  critics  ?  For 
the  business  of  the  powders,  which  so  many 
have  censured,  is,  I  am  relieved  to  say,  not 
mine  at  all  but  the  Brownies'.    Of  another  tale, 


A  CHAPTER  ON  DREAMS        195 

in  case  the  reader  should  have  glanced  at  it, 
I  may  say  a  word :  the  not  very  defensible  story 
of  Olalla.  Here  the  court,  the  mother,  the 
mother's  niche,  Olalla,  Olalla's  chamber,  the 
meetings  on  the  stair,  the  broken  window,  the 
ugly  scene  of  the  bite,  were  all  given  me  in  bulk 
and  detail  as  I  have  tried  to  write  them;  to 
this  I  added  only  the  external  scenery  (for  in 
my  dream  I  never  was  beyond  the  court),  the 
portrait,  the  characters  of  Felipe  and  the 
priest,  the  moral,  such  as  it  is,  and  the  last 
pages,  such  as,  alas !  they  are.  And  I  may  even 
say  that  in  this  case  the  moral  itself  was  given 
me;  for  it  arose  immediately  on  a  comparison 
of  the  mother  and  the  daughter,  and  from  the 
hideous  trick  of  atavism  in  the  first.  Sometimes 
a  parabolic  sense  is  still  more  undeniably  pres- 
ent in  a  dream;  sometimes  I  cannot  but  suppose 
my  Brownies  have  been  aping  Bunyan,  and  yet 
in  no  case  with  what  would  possibly  be  called  a 
moral  in  a  tract;  never  with  the  ethical  narrow- 
ness; conveying  hints  instead  of  life's  larger 
limitations  and  that  sort  of  sense  which  we 
seem  to  perceive  in  the  arabesque  of  time  and 
space. 

For  the  most  part,  it  will  be  seen,  my  Brownies 
are  somewhat  fantastic,  like  their  stories  hot 
and  hot,  full  of  passion  and  the  picturesque, 
alive  with  animating  incident;  and  they  have 


196  LEARNING  TO  WRITE 

no  prejudice  against  the  supernatural.  But  the 
other  day  they  gave  me  a  surprise,  entertaining 
me  with  a  love-story,  a  little  April  comedy, 
which  I  ought  certainly  to  hand  over  to  the  au- 
thor of  A  Chance  Acquaintance,  for  he  could 
write  it  as  it  should  be  written,  and  I  am  sure 
(although  I  mean  to  try)  that  I  cannot.— But 
who  would  have  supposed  that  a  Brownie  of 
mine  should  invent  a  tale  for  Mr.  Howells? 


xn 

ON  SOME  TECHNICAL  ELEMENTS  OF 
STYLE  IN  LITERATURE  * 

There  is  nothing  more  disenchanting  to  man 
than  to  be  shown  the  springs  and  mechanism  of 
any  art.  All  our  arts  and  occupations  lie  wholly 
on  the  surface;  it  is  on  the  surface  that  we  per- 
ceive their  beauty,  fitness,  and  significance; 
and  to  pry  below  is  to  be  appalled  by  their 
emptiness  and  shocked  by  the  coarseness  of 
the  strings  and  pulleys.  In  a  similar  way, 
psychology  itself,  when  pushed  to  any  nicety, 
discovers  an  abhorrent  baldness,  but  rather 
from  the  fault  of  our  analysis  than  from  any 
poverty  native  to  the  mind.  And  perhaps  in 
aesthetics  the  reason  is  the  same:  those  dis- 
closures which  seem  fatal  to  the  dignity  of  art 
seem  so  perhaps  only  in  the  proportion  of  our 
ignorance;  and  those  conscious  and  uncon- 
scious artifices  which  it  seems  unworthy  of  the 
serious  artist  to  employ  were  yet,  if  we  had  the 
power  to  trace  them  to  their  springs,  indications 

*  First  published  in  the  Contemporary  Review,  April, 
1885. 

107 


198  LEARNING  TO  WRITE 

of  a  delicacy  of  the  sense  finer  than  we  conceive, 
and  hints  of  ancient  harmonies  in  nature.  This 
ignorance  at  least  is  largely  irremediable.  We 
shall  never  learn  the  affinities  of  beauty,  for 
they  lie  too  deep  in  nature  and  too  far  back  in 
the  mysterious  history  of  man.  The  amateur, 
in  consequence,  will  always  grudgingly  receive 
details  of  method,  which  can  be  stated  but 
never  can  wholly  be  explained;  nay,  on  the 
principle  laid  down  in  "Hudibras,"  that 

"Still  the  less  they  understand, 
The  more  they  admire  the  sleight-of-hand," 

many  are  conscious  at  each  new  disclosure  of  a 
diminution  in  the  ardour  of  their  pleasure.  I 
must  therefore  warn  that  well-known  character, 
the  general  reader,  that  I  am  here  embarked 
upon  a  most  distasteful  business:  taking  down 
the  picture  from  the  wall  and  looking  on  the 
back;  and,  like  the  inquiring  child,  pulling  the 
musical  cart  to  pieces. 

i.  Choice  of  Words. — The  art  of  literature 
stands  apart  from  among  its  sisters,  because  the 
material  in  which  the  literary  artist  works  is  the 
dialect  of  life;  hence,  on  the  one  hand,  a  strange 
freshness  and  immediacy  of  address  to  the  public 
mind,  which  is  ready  prepared  to  understand 
it;  but  hence,  on  the  other,  a  singular  limitation. 


ON  STYLE  IN  LITERATURE      199 

The  sister  arts  enjoy  the  use  of  a  plastic  and 
ductile  material,  like  the  modeller's  clay;  litera- 
ture alone  is  condemned  to  work  in  mosaic  with 
finite  and  quite  rigid  words.  You  have  seen 
these  blocks,  dear  to  the  nursery:  this  one  a 
pillar,  that  a  pediment,  a  third  a  window  or  a 
vase.  It  is  with  blocks  of  just  such  arbitrary 
size  and  figure  that  the  literary  architect  is  con- 
demned to  design  the  palace  of  his  art.  Nor 
is  this  all;  for  since  these  blocks,  or  words,  are 
the  acknowledged  currency  of  our  daily  affairs, 
there  are  here  possible  none  of  those  suppres- 
sions by  which  other  arts  obtain  relief,  con- 
tinuity, and  vigour:  no  hieroglyphic  touch,  no 
smoothed  impasto,  no  inscrutable  shadow,  as 
in  painting;  no  blank  wall,  as  in  architecture; 
but  every  word,  phrase,  sentence,  and  para- 
graph must  move  in  a  logical  progression,  and 
convey  a  definite  conventional  import. 

Now  the  first  merit  which  attracts  in  the 
pages  of  a  good  writer,  or  the  talk  of  a  brilliant 
conversationalist,  is  the  apt  choice  and  contrast 
of  the  words  employed.  It  is,  indeed,  a  strange 
art  to  take  these  blocks,  rudely  conceived  for 
the  purpose  of  the  market  or  the  bar,  and  by 
tact  of  application  touch  them  to  the  finest 
meanings  and  distinctions,  restore  to  them 
their  primal  energy,  wittily  shift  them  to  an- 
other issue,  or  make  of  them  a  drum  to  rouse 


2oo  LEARNING  TO  WRITE 

the  passions.  But  though  this  form  of  merit  is 
without  doubt  the  most  sensible  and  seizing, 
it  is  far  from  being  equally  present  in  all  writers. 
The  effect  of  words  in  Shakespeare,  their  singular 
justice,  significance,  and  poetic  charm,  is  dif- 
ferent, indeed,  from  the  effect  of  words  in  Ad- 
dison or  Fielding.  Or,  to  take  an  example 
nearer  home,  the  words  in  Carlyle  seem  elec- 
trified into  an  energy  of  lineament,  like  the 
faces  of  men  furiously  moved;  whilst  the  words 
in  Macaulay,  apt  enough  to  convey  his  meaning, 
harmonious  enough  in  sound,  yet  glide  from  the 
memory  like  undistinguished  elements  in  a 
general  effect.  But  the  first  class  of  writers 
have  no  monopoly  of  literary  merit.  There  is  a 
sense  in  which  Addison  is  superior  to  Carlyle; 
a  sense  in  which  Cicero  is  better  than  Tacitus, 
in  which  Voltaire  excels  Montaigne:  it  certainly 
lies  not  in  the  choice  of  words;  it  lies  not  in  the 
interest  or  value  of  the  matter;  it  lies  not  in 
force  of  intellect,  of  poetry,  or  of  humour.  The 
three  first  are  but  infants  to  the  three  second; 
and  yet  each,  in  a  particular  point  of  literary 
art,  excels  his  superior  in  the  whole.  What  is 
that  point? 

2.  The  Web. — Literature,  although  it  stands 
apart  by  reason  of  the  great  destiny  and  gen- 
eral use  of  its  medium  in  the  affairs  of  men,  is 
yet  an  art  like  other  arts.    Of  these  we  may  dis- 


ON  STYLE  IN  LITERATURE      201 

tinguish  two  great  classes:  those  arts,  like  sculp- 
ture, painting,  acting,  which  are  representa- 
tive, or,  as  used  to  be  said  very  clumsily, 
imitative;  and  those,  like  architecture,  music, 
and  the  dance,  which  are  self-sufficient,  and 
merely  presentative.  Each  class,  in  right  of  this 
distinction,  obeys  principles  apart;  yet  both 
may  claim  a  common  ground  of  existence,  and 
it  may  be  said  with  sufficient  justice  that  the 
motive  and  end  of  any  art  whatever  is  to  make 
a  pattern;  a  pattern,  it  may  be,  of  colours,  of 
sounds,  of  changing  attitudes,  geometrical  fig- 
ures, or  imitative  lines;  but  still  a  pattern. 
That  is  the  plane  on  which  these  sisters  meet; 
it  is  by  this  that  they  are  arts;  and  if  it  be  well 
they  should  at  times  forget  their  childish  origin, 
addressing  their  intelligence  to  virile  tasks,  and 
performing  unconsciously  that  necessary  func- 
tion of  their  life,  to  make  a  pattern,  it  is  still 
imperative  that  the  pattern  shall  be  made. 

Music  and  literature,  the  two  temporal  arts, 
contrive  their  pattern  of  sounds  in  time;  or,  in 
other  words,  of  sounds  and  pauses.  Communica- 
tion may  be  made  in  broken  words,  the  business 
of  life  be  carried  on  with  substantives  alone; 
but  that  is  not  what  we  call  literature;  and  the 
true  business  of  the  literary  artist  is  to  plait  or 
weave  his  meaning,  involving  it  around  itself; 
so  that  each  sentence,  by  successive  phrases, 


202  LEARNING  TO  WRITE 

shall  first  come  into  a  kind  of  knot,  and  then, 
after  a  moment  of  suspended  meaning,  solve  and 
clear  itself.  In  every  properly  constructed  sen- 
tence there  should  be  observed  this  knot  or 
hitch;  so  that  (however  delicately)  we  are  led 
to  foresee,  to  expect,  and  then  to  welcome  the 
successive  phrases.  The  pleasure  may  be 
heightened  by  an  element  of  surprise,  as,  very 
grossly,  in  the  common  figure  of  the  antithesis, 
or,  with  much  greater  subtlety,  where  an  antith- 
esis is  first  suggested  and  then  deftly  evaded. 
Each  phrase,  besides,  is  to  be  comely  in  itself; 
and  between  the  implication  and  the  evolution 
of  the  sentence  there  should  be  a  satisfying 
equipoise  of  sound;  for  nothing  more  often  dis- 
appoints the  ear  than  a  sentence  solemnly  and 
sonorously  prepared,  and  hastily  and  weakly 
finished.  Nor  should  the  balance  be  too  strik- 
ing and  exact,  for  the  one  rule  is  to  be  infinitely 
various;  to  interest,  to  disappoint,  to  surprise, 
and  yet  still  to  gratify;  to  be  ever  changing,  as 
it  were,  the  stitch,  and  yet  still  to  give  the  effect 
of  an  ingenious  neatness. 

The  conjurer  juggles  with  two  oranges,  and 
our  pleasure  in  beholding  him  springs  from 
this,  that  neither  is  for  an  instant  overlooked 
or  sacrificed.  So  with  the  writer.  His  pattern, 
which  is  to  please  the  supersensual  ear,  is  yet 
addressed,  throughout  and  first  of  all,  to  the 


ON  STYLE  IN  LITERATURE      203 

demands  of  logic.  Whatever  be  the  obscur- 
ities, whatever  the  intricacies  of  the  argument, 
the  neatness  of  the  fabric  must  not  suffer,  or  the 
artist  has  been  proved  unequal  to  his  design. 
And,  on  the  other  hand,  no  form  of  words  must 
be  selected,  no  knot  must  be  tied  among  the 
phrases,  unless  knot  and  word  be  precisely  what 
is  wanted  to  forward  and  illuminate  the  argu- 
ment; for  to  fail  in  this  is  to  swindle  in  the  game. 
The  genius  of  prose  rejects. the  cheville  no  less 
emphatically  than  the  laws  of  verse;  and  the 
cheville,  I  should  perhaps  explain  to  some  of  my 
readers,  is  any  meaningless  or  very  watered 
phrase  employed  to  strike  a  balance  in  the 
sound.  Pattern  and  argument  live  in  each 
other;  and  it  is  by  the  brevity,  clearness,  charm, 
or  emphasis  of  the  second,  that  we  judge  the 
strength  and  fitness  of  the  first. 

Style  is  synthetic;  and  the  artist,  seeking,  so 
to  speak,  a  peg  to  plait  about,  takes  up  at  once 
two  or  more  elements  or  two  or  more  views  of 
the  subject  in  hand;  combines,  implicates,  and 
contrasts  them;  and  while,  in  one  sense,  he  was 
merely  seeking  an  occasion  for  the  necessary 
knot,  he  will  be  found,  in  the  other,  to  have 
greatly  enriched  the  meaning,  or  to  have  trans- 
acted the  work  of  two  sentences  in  the  space 
of  one.  In  the  change  from  the  successive  shal- 
low statements  of  the  old   chronicler  to   the 


204  LEARNING  TO  WRITE 

dense  and  luminous  flow  of  highly  synthetic 
narrative,  there  is  implied  a  vast  amount  of 
both  philosophy  and  wit.  The  philosophy  we 
clearly  see,  recognising  in  the  synthetic  writer  a 
far  more  deep  and  stimulating  view  of  life,  and 
a  far  keener  sense  of  the  generation  and  affin- 
ity of  events.  The  wit  we  might  imagine  to  be 
lost;  but  it  is  not  so,  for  it  is  just  that  wit,  these 
perpetual  nice  contrivances,  these  difficulties 
overcome,  this  double  purpose  attained,  these 
two  oranges  kept  simultaneously  dancing  in  the 
air,  that,  consciously  or  not,  afford  the  reader 
his  delight.  Nay,  and  this  wit,  so  little  recog- 
nised, is  the  necessary  organ  of  that  philosophy 
which  we  so  much  admire.  That  style  is  there- 
fore the  most  perfect,  not,  as  fools  say,  which 
is  the  most  natural,  for  the  most  natural  is  the 
disjointed  babble  of  the  chronicler;  but  which 
attains  the  highest  degree  of  elegant  and  preg- 
nant implication  unobtrusively;  or  if  obtru- 
sively, then  with  the  greatest  gain  to  sense  and 
vigour.  Even  the  derangement  of  the  phrases 
from  their  (so-called)  natural  order  is  luminous 
for  the  mind;  and  it  is  by  the  means  of  such  de- 
signed reversal  that  the  elements  of  a  judgment 
may  be  most  pertinently  marshalled,  or  the 
stages  of  a  complicated  action  most  perspicu- 
ously bound  into  one. 
The  web,  then,  or  the  pattern:  a  web  at  once 


ON  STYLE  IN  LITERATURE      205 

sensuous  and  logical,  an  elegant  and  pregnant 
texture:  that  is  style,  that  is  the  foundation  of 
the  art  of  literature.  Books  indeed  continue  to 
be  read,  for  the  interest  of  the  fact  or  fable,  in 
which  this  quality  is  poorly  represented,  but 
still  it  will  be  there.  And,  on  the  other  hand, 
how  many  do  we  continue  to  peruse  and  re- 
peruse  with  pleasure  whose  only  merit  is  the 
elegance  of  texture?  I  am  tempted  to  mention 
Cicero;  and  since  Mr.  Anthony  Trollope  is  dead, 
I  will.  It  is  a  poor  diet  for  the  mind,  a  very 
colourless  and  toothless  "criticism  of  life";  but 
we  enjoy  the  pleasure  of  a  most  intricate  and 
dexterous  pattern,  every  stitch  a  model  at  once 
of  elegance  and  of  good  sense;  and  the  two 
oranges,  even  if  one  of  them  be  rotten,  kept 
dancing  with  inimitable  grace. 

Up  to  this  moment  I  have  had  my  eye  mainly 
upon  prose;  for  though  in  verse  also  the  implica- 
tion of  the  logical  texture  is  a  crowning  beauty, 
yet  in  verse  it  may  be  dispensed  with.  You 
would  think  that  here  was  a  death-blow  to  all 
I  have  been  saying;  and  far  from  that,  it  is  but  a 
new  illustration  of  the  principle  involved.  For 
if  the  versifier  is  not  bound  to  weave  a  pattern 
of  his  own,  it  is  because  another  pattern  has 
been  formally  imposed  upon  him  by  the  laws 
of  verse.  For  that  is  the  essence  of  a  prosody. 
Verse  may  be  rhythmical;  it  may  be  merely 


206  LEARNING  TO  WRITE 

alliterative;  it  may,  like  the  French,  depend 
wholly  on  the  (quasi)  regular  recurrence  of  the 
rhyme;  or,  like  the  Hebrew,  it  may  consist  in 
the  strangely  fanciful  device  of  repeating  the 
same  idea.  It  does  not  matter  on  what  principle 
the  law  is  based,  so  it  be  a  law.  It  may  be  pure 
convention;  it  may  have  no  inherent  beauty; 
all  that  we  have  a  right  to  ask  of  any  prosody 
is,  that  it  shall  lay  down  a  pattern  for  the 
writer,  and  that  what  it  lays  down  shall  be 
neither  too  easy  nor  too  hard.  Hence  it  comes 
that  it  is  much  easier  for  men  of  equal  facility 
to  write  fairly  pleasing  verse  than  reasonably 
interesting  prose;  for  in  prose  the  pattern  it- 
self has  to  be  invented,  and  the  difficulties  first 
created  before  they  can  be  solved.  Hence, 
again,  there  follows  the  peculiar  greatness  of  the 
true  versifier:  such  as  Shakespeare,  Milton,  and 
Victor  Hugo,  whom  I  place  beside  them  as 
versifier  merely,  not  as  poet.  These  not  only 
knit  and  knot  the  logical  texture  of  the  style 
with  all  the  dexterity  and  strength  of  prose; 
they  not  only  fill  up  the  pattern  of  the  verse 
with  infinite  variety  and  sober  wit;  but  they 
give  us,  besides,  a  rare  and  special  pleasure,  by 
the  art,  comparable  to  that  of  counterpoint, 
with  which  they  follow  at  the  same  time,  and 
now  contrast,  and  now  combine,  the  double 
pattern  of  the  texture  and  the  verse.    Here  the 


ON  STYLE  IN  LITERATURE      207 

sounding  line  concludes;  a  little  further  on,  the 
well-knit  sentence;  and  yet  a  little  further,  and 
both  will  reach  their  solution  on  the  same  ring- 
ing syllable.  The  best  that  can  be  offered  by  the 
best  writer  of  prose  is  to  show  us  the  develop- 
ment of  the  idea  and  the  stylistic  pattern  pro- 
ceed hand  in  hand,  sometimes  by  an  obvious  and 
triumphant  effort,  sometimes  with  a  great  air 
of  ease  and  nature.  The  writer  of  verse,  by 
virtue  of  conquering  another  difficulty,  delights 
us  with  a  new  series  of  triumphs.  He  follows 
three  purposes  where  his  rival  followed  only 
two;  and  the  change  is  of  precisely  the  same  na- 
ture as  that  from  melody  to  harmony.  Or  if 
you  prefer  to  return  to  the  juggler,  behold  him 
now,  to  the  vastly  increased  enthusiasm  of  the 
spectators,  juggling  with  three  oranges  instead 
of  two.  Thus  it  is:  added  difficulty,  added 
beauty;  and  the  pattern,  with  every  fresh  ele- 
ment, becoming  more  interesting  in  itself. 

Yet  it  must  not  be  thought  that  verse  is 
simply  an  addition;  something  is  lost  as  well  as 
something  gained;  and  there  remains  plainly 
traceable,  in  comparing  the  best  prose  with  the 
best  verse,  a  certain  broad  distinction  of  method 
in  the  web.  Tight  as  the  versifier  may  draw 
the  knot  of  logic,  yet  for  the  ear  he  still  leaves 
the  tissue  of  the  sentence  floating  somewhat 
loose.    In  prose,  the  sentence  turns  upon  a  pivot, 


208  LEARNING  TO  WRITE 

nicely  balanced,  and  fits  into  itself  with  an 
obtrusive  neatness  like  a  puzzle.  The  ear  re- 
marks and  is  singly  gratified  by  this  return  and 
balance;  while  in  verse  it  is  all  diverted  to  the 
measure.  To  find  comparable  passages  is  hard; 
for  either  the  versifier  is  hugely  the  superior  of 
the  rival,  or,  if  he  be  not,  and  still  persist  in  his 
more  delicate  enterprise,  he  fails  to  be  as  widely 
his  inferior.  But  let  us  select  them  from  the 
pages  of  the  same  writer,  one  who  was  am- 
bidexter; let  us  take,  for  instance,  Rumour's 
Prologue  to  the  Second  Part  of  Henry  IV.,  a 
fine  flourish  of  eloquence  in  Shakespeare's  sec- 
ond manner,  and  set  it  side  by  side  with  Fal- 
staff's  praise  of  sherris,  act  iv.  scene  i.;  or  let 
us  compare  the  beautiful  prose  spoken  through- 
out by  Rosalind  and  Orlando;  compare,  for  ex- 
ample, the  first  speech  of  all,  Orlando's  speech 
to  Adam,  with  what  passage  it  shall  please  you 
to  select — the  Seven  Ages  from  the  same  play, 
or  even  such  a  stave  of  nobility  as  Othello's 
farewell  to  war;  and  still  you  will  be  able  to  per- 
ceive, if  you  have  an  ear  for  that  class  of  music, 
a  certain  superior  degree  of  organisation  in  the 
prose;  a  compacter  fitting  of  the  parts;  a  bal- 
ance in  the  swing  and  the  return  as  of  a  throb- 
bing pendulum.  We  must  not,  in  things  tem- 
poral, take  from  those  who  have  little,  the  little 


ON  STYLE  IN  LITERATURE      209 

that  they  have;  the  merits  of  prose  are  inferior, 
but  they  are  not  the  same;  it  is  a  little  kingdom, 
but  an  independent. 

3.  Rhythm  of  the  Phrase. — Some  way  back,  I 
used  a  word  which  still  awaits  an  application. 
Each  phrase,  I  said,  was  to  be  comely;  but  what 
is  a  comely  phrase?  In  all  ideal  and  material 
points,  literature,  being  a  representative  art, 
must  look  for  analogies  to  painting  and  the  like; 
but  in  what  is  technical  and  executive,  being  a 
temporal  art,  it  must  seek  for  them  in  music. 
Each  phrase  of  each  sentence,  like  an  air  or  a 
recitative  in  music,  should  be  so  artfully  com- 
pounded out  of  long  and  short,  out  of  accented 
and  unaccented,  as  to  gratify  the  sensual  ear. 
And  of  this  the  ear  is  the  sole  judge.  It  is  im- 
possible to  lay  down  laws.  Even  in  our  ac- 
centual and  rhythmic  language  no  analysis  can 
find  the  secret  of  the  beauty  of  a  verse;  how 
much  less,  then,  of  those  phrases,  such  as  prose 
is  built  of,  which  obey  no  law  but  to  be  lawless 
and  yet  to  please?  The  little  that  we  know  of 
verse  (and  for  my  part  I  owe  it  all  to  my  friend 
Professor  Fleeming  Jenkin)  is,  however,  par- 
ticularly interesting  in  the  present  connection. 
We  have  been  accustomed  to  describe  the  heroic 
line  as  five  iambic  feet,  and  to  be  filled  with  pain 
and  confusion  whenever,  as  by  the  conscien- 


210  LEARNING  TO  WRITE 

tious  schoolboy,  we  have  heard  our  own  descrip- 
tion put  in  practice. 

"All   night  |  the   dread  |  less   an  |  gel   un  |  pur- 
sued," * 

goes  the  schoolboy;  but  though  we  close  our 
ears,  we  cling  to  our  definition,  in  spite  of  its 
proved  and  naked  insufficiency.  Mr.  Jenkin 
was  not  so  easily  pleased,  and  readily  discov- 
ered that  the  heroic  line  consists  of  four  groups, 
or,  if  you  prefer  the  phrase,  contains  four 
pauses: 

"All  night  |  the  dreadless  |  angel  |  unpursued." 

Four  groups,  each  practically  uttered  as  one 
word:  the  first,  in  this  case,  an  iamb;  the  second, 
an  amphibrachys;  the  third,  a  trochee;  and  the 
fourth,  an  amphimacer;  and  yet  our  schoolboy, 
with  no  other  liberty  but  that  of  inflicting  pain, 
had  triumphantly  scanned  it  as  five  iambs. 
Perceive,  now,  this  fresh  richness  of  intricacy 
in  the  web;  this  fourth  orange,  hitherto  unre- 
marked, but  still  kept  flying  with  the  others. 
What  had  seemed  to  be  one  thing  it  now  ap- 
pears is  two;  and,  like  some  puzzle  in  arithmetic, 
the  verse  is  made  at  the  same  time  to  read  in 
fives  and  to  read  in  fours. 

*  Milton. 


ON  STYLE  IN  LITERATURE      211 

But  again,  four  is  not  necessary.  We  do  not, 
indeed,  find  verses  in  six  groups,  because  there 
is  not  room  for  six  in  the  ten  syllables;  and  we 
do  not  find  verses  of  two,  because  one  of  the 
main  distinctions  of  verse  from  prose  resides 
in  the  comparative  shortness  of  the  group;  but 
it  is  even  common  to  find  verses  of  three. 
Five  is  the  one  forbidden  number;  because  five 
is  the  number  of  the  feet;  and  if  five  were 
chosen,  the  two  patterns  would  coincide,  and 
that  opposition  which  is  the  life  of  verse  would 
instantly  be  lost.  We  have  here  a  clue  to  the 
effect  of  polysyllables,  above  all  in  Latin,  where 
they  are  so  common  and  make  so  brave  an 
architecture  in  the  verse;  for  the  polysyllable  is 
a  group  of  Nature's  making.  If  but  some 
Roman  would  return  from  Hades  (Martial,  for 
choice),  and  tell  me  by  what  conduct  of  the 
voice  these  thundering  verses  should  be  uttered 
— "Aut  Lacedcemonium  Tarentum"  for  a  case  in 
point — I  feel  as  if  I  should  enter  at  last  into  the 
full  enjoyment  of  the  best  of  human  verses. 

But,  again,  the  five  feet  are  all  iambic,  or 
supposed  to  be;  by  the  mere  count  of  syllables 
the  four  groups  cannot  be  all  iambic;  as  a  ques- 
tion of  elegance,  I  doubt  if  any  one  of  them  re- 
quires to  be  so;  and  I  am  certain  that  for  choice 
no  two  of  them  should  scan  the  same.  The 
singular  beauty  of  the  verse  analysed  above  is 


212  LEARNING  TO  WRITE 

due,  so  far  as  analysis  can  carry  us,  part,  in- 
deed, to  the  clever  repetition  of  L,  D,  and  N, 
but  part  to  this  variety  of  scansion  in  the 
groups.  The  groups  which,  like  the  bar  in 
music,  break  up  the  verse  for  utterance,  fall 
uniambically;  and  in  declaiming  a  so-called 
iambic  verse,  it  may  so  happen  that  we  never 
utter  one  iambic  foot.  And  yet  to  this  neglect 
of  the  original  beat  there  is  a  limit. 


"Athens,  the  eye  of  Greece,  mother  of  arts, 


»  * 


is,  with  all  its  eccentricities,  a  good  heroic  line; 
for  though  it  scarcely  can  be  said  to  indicate 
the  beat  of  the  iamb,  it  certainly  suggests  no 
other  measure  to  the  ear.    But  begin 

"Mother  Athens,  eye  of  Greece,,, 

or  merely  "Mother  Athens,"  and  the  game  is 
up,  for  the  trochaic  beat  has  been  suggested. 
The  eccentric  scansion  of  the  groups  is  an 
adornment;  but  as  soon  as  the  original  beat  has 
been  forgotten,  they  cease  implicitly  to  be  ec- 
centric. Variety  is  what  is  sought;  but  if  we 
destroy  the  original  mould,  one  of  the  terms  of 
this  variety  is  lost,  and  we  fall  back  on  same- 
ness. Thus,  both  as  to  the  arithmetical  meas- 
ure of  the  verse,  and  the  degree  of  regularity  in 

*  Milton. 


ON  STYLE  IN  LITERATURE      213 

scansion,  we  see  the  laws  of  prosody  to  have  one 
common  purpose:  to  keep  alive  the  opposition 
of  two  schemes  simultaneously  followed;  to 
keep  them  notably  apart,  though  still  coinci- 
dent; and  to  balance  them  with  such  judicial 
nicety  before  the  reader,  that  neither  shall  be 
unperceived  and  neither  signally  prevail. 

The  rule  of  rhythm  in  prose  is  not  so  intricate. 
Here,  too,  we  write  in  groups,  or  phrases,  as  I 
prefer  to  call  them,  for  the  prose  phrase  is 
greatly  longer  and  is  much  more  nonchalantly 
uttered  than  the  group  in  verse;  so  that  not 
only  is  there  a  greater  interval  of  continuous 
sound  between  the  pauses,  but,  for  that  very 
reason,  word  is  linked  more  readily  to  word  by 
a  more  summary  enunciation.  Still,  the  phrase 
is  the  strict  analogue  of  the  group,  and  successive 
phrases,  like  successive  groups,  must  differ 
openly  in  length  and  rhythm.  The  rule  of 
scansion  in  verse  is  to  suggest  no  measure  but 
the  one  in  hand;  in  prose,  to  suggest  no  measure 
at  all.  Prose  must  be  rhythmical,  and  it  may  be 
as  much  so  as  you  will;  but  it  must  not  be 
metrical.  It  may  be  anything,  but  it  must  not 
be  verse.  A  single  heroic  line  may  very  well 
pass  and  not  disturb  the  somewhat  larger  stride 
of  the  prose  style;  but  one  following  another 
will  produce  an  instant  impression  of  poverty, 
flatness,  and  disenchantment.    The  same  lines 


2i4  LEARNING  TO  WRITE 

delivered  with  the  measured  utterance  of  verse 
would  perhaps  seem  rich  in  variety.  By  the 
more  summary  enunciation  proper  to  prose,  as 
to  a  more  distant  vision,  these  niceties  of  dif- 
ference are  lost.  A  whole  verse  is  uttered  as 
one  phrase;  and  the  ear  is  soon  wearied  by  a 
succession  of  groups  identical  in  length.  The 
prose  writer,  in  fact,  since  he  is  allowed  to  be  so 
much  less  harmonious,  is  condemned  to  a  per- 
petually fresh  variety  of  movement  on  a  larger 
scale,  and  must  never  disappoint  the  ear  by  the 
trot  of  an  accepted  metre.  And  this  obligation 
is  the  third  orange  with  which  he  has  to  juggle, 
the  third  quality  which  the  prose  writer  must 
work  into  his  pattern  of  words.  It  may  be 
thought  perhaps  that  this  is  a  quality  of  ease 
rather  than  a  fresh  difficulty;  but  such  is  the 
inherently  rhythmical  strain  of  the  English 
language,  that  the  bad  writer — and  must  I  take 
for  example  that  admired  friend  of  my  boyhood, 
Captain  Reid? — the  inexperienced  writer,  as 
Dickens  in  his  earlier  attempts  to  be  impressive, 
and  the  jaded  writer,  as  any  one  may  see  for 
himself,  all  tend  to  fall  at  once  into  the  produc- 
tion of  bad  blank  verse.  And  here  it  may  be 
pertinently  asked,  Why  bad?  And  I  suppose 
it  might  be  enough  to  answer  that  no  man 
ever  made  good  verse  by  accident,  and  that  no 
verse   can  ever  sound   otherwise   than   trivial 


ON  STYLE  IN  LITERATURE      215 

when  uttered  with  the  delivery  of  prose.  But 
we  can  go  beyond  such  answers.  The  weak 
side  of  verse  is  the  regularity  of  the  beat,  which 
in  itself  is  decidedly  less  impressive  than  the 
movement  of  the  nobler  prose;  and  it  is  just 
into  this  weak  side,  and  this  alone,  that  our 
careless  writer  falls.  A  peculiar  density  and 
mass,  consequent  on  the  nearness  of  the  pauses, 
is  one  of  the  chief  good  qualities  of  verse;  but 
this  our  accidental  versifier,  still  following  after 
the  swift  gait  and  large  gestures  of  prose,  does 
not  so  much  as  aspire  to  imitate.  Lastly,  since 
he  remains  unconscious  that  he  is  making  verse 
at  all,  it  can  never  occur  to  him  to  extract  those 
effects  of  counterpoint  and  opposition  which  I 
have  referred  to  as  the  final  grace  and  justifica- 
tion of  verse,  and,  I  may  add,  of  blank  verse  in 
particular. 

4.  Contents  of  the  Phrase. — Here  is  a  great 
deal  of  talk  about  rhythm — and  naturally;  for 
in  our  canorous  language  rhythm  is  always  at 
the  door.  But  it  must  not  be  forgotten  that  in 
some  languages  this  element  is  almost,  if  not 
quite,  extinct,  and  that  in  our  own  it  is  probably 
decaying.  The  even  speech  of  many  educated 
Americans  sounds  the  note  of  danger.  I  should 
see  it  go  with  something  as  bitter  as  despair,  but 
I  should  not  be  desperate.  As  in  verse  no  ele 
ment,  not  even  rhythm,  is  necessary,  so,  in 


2i6  LEARNING  TO  WRITE 

prose  also,  other  sorts  of  beauty  will  arise  and 
take  the  place  and  play  the  part  of  those  that 
we  outlive.  The  beauty  of  the  expected  beat  in 
verse,  the  beauty  in  prose  of  its  larger  and  more 
lawless  melody,  patent  as  they  are  to  English 
hearing,  are  already  silent  in  the  ears  of  our 
next  neighbours;  for  in  France  the  oratorical 
accent  and  the  pattern  of  the  web  have  almost 
or  altogether  succeeded  to  their  places;  and  the 
French  prose  writer  would  be  astounded  at  the 
labours  of  his  brother  across  the  Channel,  and 
how  a  good  quarter  of  his  toil,  above  all  irwita 
Minerva,  is  to  avoid  writing  verse.  So  wonder- 
fully far  apart  have  races  wandered  in  spirit, 
and  so  hard  it  is  to  understand  the  literature 
next  door ! 

Yet  French  prose  is  distinctly  better  than 
English;  and  French  verse,  above  all  while  Hugo 
lives,  it  will  not  do  to  place  upon  one  side. 
What  is  more  to  our  purpose,  a  phrase  or  a 
verse  in  French  is  easily  distinguishable  as 
comely  or  uncomely.  There  is  then  another 
element  of  comeliness  hitherto  overlooked  in 
this  analysis:  the  contents  of  the  phrase.  Each 
phrase  in  literature  is  built  of  sounds,  as  each 
phrase  in  music  consists  of  notes.  One  sound 
suggests,  echoes,  demands,  and  harmonises  with 
another;  and  the  art  of  rightly  using  these  con- 
cordances is  the  final  art  in  literature.  It  used 
to  be  a  piece  of  good  advice  to  all  young  writers 


ON  STYLE  IN  LITERATURE      217 

to  avoid  alliteration;  and  the  advice  was  sound, 
in  so  far  as  it  prevented  daubing.  None  the 
less  for  that,  was  it  abominable  nonsense,  and 
the  mere  raving  of  those  blindest  of  the  blind 
who  will  not  see.  The  beauty  of  the  contents  of 
a  phrase,  or  of  a  sentence,  depends  implicitly 
upon  alliteration  and  upon  assonance.  The 
vowel  demands  to  be  repeated;  the  consonant 
demands  to  be  repeated;  and  both  cry  aloud 
to  be  perpetually  varied.  You  may  follow  the 
adventures  of  a  letter  through  any  passage  that 
has  particularly  pleased  you;  rind  it,  perhaps, 
denied  awhile,  to  tantalise  the  ear;  find  it  fired 
again  at  you  in  a  whole  broadside;  or  find  it 
pass  into  congenerous  sounds,  one  liquid  or 
labial  melting  away  into  another.  And  you 
will  find  another  and  much  stranger  circum- 
stance. Literature  is  written  by  and  for  two 
senses:  a  sort  of  internal  ear,  quick  to  per- 
ceive "unheard  melodies";  and  the  eye,  which 
directs  the  pen  and  deciphers  the  printed  phrase. 
Well,  even  as  there  are  rhymes  for  the  eye,  so 
you  will  find  that  there  are  assonances  and 
alliterations;  that  where  an  author  is  running 
the  open  A,  deceived  by  the  eye  and  our  strange 
English  spelling,  he  will  often  show  a  tender- 
ness for  the  flat  A;  and  that  where  he  is  running 
a  particular  consonant,  he  will  not  improbably 
rejoice  to  write  it  down  even  when  it  is  mute  or 
bears  a  different  value. 


2i8  LEARNING  TO  WRITE 

Here,  then,  we  have  a  fresh  pattern — a  pat- 
tern, to  speak  grossly,  of  letters — which  makes 
the  fourth  preoccupation  of  the  prose  writer, 
and  the  fifth  of  the  versifier.  At  times  it  is  very 
delicate  and  hard  to  perceive,  and  then  perhaps 
most  excellent  and  winning  (I  say  perhaps); 
but  at  times  again  the  elements  of  this  literal 
melody  stand  more  boldly  forward  and  usurp 
the  ear.  It  becomes,  therefore,  somewhat  a 
matter  of  conscience  to  select  examples;  and  as 
I  cannot  very  well  ask  the  reader  to  help  me,  I 
shall  do  the  next  best  by  giving  him  the  reason 
or  the  history  of  each  selection.  The  two  first, 
one  in  prose,  one  in  verse,  I  chose  without 
previous  analysis,  simply  as  engaging  passages 
that  had  long  re-echoed  in  my  ear. 

"I  cannot  praise  a  fugitive  and  cloistered  vir- 
tue, unexercised  and  unbreathed,  that  never 
sallies  out  and  sees  her  adversary,  but  slinks 
out  of  the  race  where  that  immortal  garland  is 
to  be  run  for,  not  without  dust  and  heat."* 
Down  to  "virtue,"  the  current  S  and  R  are 
both  announced  and  repeated  unobtrusively, 
and  by  way  of  a  grace-note  that  almost  insepa- 
rable group  PVF  is  given  entire,  t     The  next 

*  Milton. 

t  As  PVF  will  continue  to  haunt  us  through  our  English 
examples,  take,  by  way  of  comparison,  this  Latin  verse,  of 
which  it  forms  a  chief  adornment,  and  do  not  hold  me  an- 
swerable for  the  all  too  Roman  freedom  of  the  sense:  "Hanc 
volo,  quae  facilis,  quae  palliolata  vagatur." 


ON  STYLE  IN  LITERATURE      219 

phrase  is  a  period  of  repose,  almost  ugly  in  it- 
self, both  S  and  R  still  audible,  and  B  given  as 
the  last  fulfilment  of  PVF.  In  the  next  four 
phrases,  from  "that  never"  down  to  "run  for," 
the  mask  is  thrown  off,  and,  but  for  a  slight 
repetition  of  the  F  and  V,  the  whole  matter 
turns,  almost  too  obtrusively,  on  S  and  R; 
first  S  coming  to  the  front,  and  then  R.  In 
the  concluding  phrase  all  these  favourite  let- 
ters, and  even  the  flat  A,  a  timid  preference  for 
which  is  just  perceptible,  are  discarded  at  a 
blow  and  in  a  bundle;  and  to  make  the  break 
more  obvious,  every  word  ends  with  a  dental, 
and  all  but  one  with  T,  for  which  we  have  been 
cautiously  prepared  since  the  beginning.  The 
singular  dignity  of  the  first  clause,  and  this 
hammer-stroke  of  the  last,  go  far  to  make  the 
charm  of  this  exquisite  sentence.  But  it  is  fair 
to  own  that  S  and  R  are  used  a  little  coarsely. 

"In  Xanadv  did  Kubla  Khan  (KANDL) 

A  stately  pleasure  dome  decree,  (KDLSR) 

Where  Alph  the  sacred  river  ran,  (KANDLSR) 

Through  caverns  measureless  to 

man,  (KANLSR) 

Down  to  a  sunless  sea."  *  (NDLS) 

Here  I  have  put  the  analysis  of  the  main 
group  alongside  the  lines;  and  the  more  it  is 
looked  at,  the  more  interesting  it  will  seem. 
But  there  are  further  niceties.     In  lines  two 

*  Coleridge. 


220  LEARNING  TO  WRITE 

and  four,  the  current  S  is  most  delicately  varied 
with  Z.  In  line  three,  the  current  flat  A  is 
twice  varied  with  the  open  A,  already  suggested 
in  line  two,  and  both  times  ("where"  and 
"sacred")  in  conjunction  with  the  current  R. 
In  the  same  line  F  and  V  (a  harmony  in  them- 
selves, even  when  shorn  of  their  comrade  P) 
are  admirably  contrasted.  And  in  line  four 
there  is  a  marked  subsidiary  M,  which  again 
was  announced  in  line  two.  I  stop  from  weari- 
ness, for  more  might  yet  be  said. 

My  next  example  was  recently  quoted  from 
Shakespeare  as  an  example  of  the  poet's  colour 
sense.  Now,  I  do  not  think  literature  has  any- 
thing to  do  with  colour,  or  poets  anyway  the 
better  of  such  a  sense;  and  I  instantly  attacked 
this  passage,  since  "purple"  was  the  word  that 
had  so  pleased  the  writer  of  the  article,  to  see 
if  there  might  not  be  some  literary  reason  for 
its  use.  It  will  be  seen  that  I  succeeded  amply; 
and  I  am  bound  to  say  I  think  the  passage  ex- 
ceptional in  Shakespeare — exceptional,  indeed, 
in  literature;  but  it  was  not  I  who  chose  it. 

"The  BaRge  she  sat  iN,  like  a  BURNished 

throNe 
BURNt  oN  the  water:  the  POOP  was  BeateN 

gold, 
PURPle  the  sails  and  so  PUR*  Fumed  that 
The  wiNds  were  love-sick  with  them."1 

*  per  *  Antony  and  Cleopatra. 


ON  STYLE  IN  LITERATURE      221 

It  may  be  asked  why  I  have  put  the  F  of  "per- 
fumed "  in  capitals;  and  I  reply,  because  this 
change  from  P  to  F  is  the  completion  of  that 
from  B  to  P,  already  so  adroitly  carried  out. 
Indeed,  the  whole  passage  is  a  monument  of 
curious  ingenuity;  and  it  seems  scarce  worth 
while  to  indicate  the  subsidiary  S,  L,  and  W. 
In  the  same  article,  a  second  passage  from 
Shakespeare  was  quoted,  once  again  as  an  ex- 
ample of  his  colour  sense: 

"A  mole  cinque-spotted  like  the  crimson  drops 
P  the  bottom  of  a  cowslip."  * 

It  is  very  curious,  very  artificial,  and  not 
worth  while  to  analyse  at  length:  I  leave  it  to 
the  reader.  But  before  I  turn  my  back  on 
Shakespeare,  I  should  like  to  quote  a  passage, 
for  my  own  pleasure,  and  for  a  very  model  of 
every  technical  art: 

"But  in  the  wind  and  tempest  of  her  frown, 

W.P.V.fF.  (st)(ow) 
Distinction  with  a  loud  and  powerful  fan, 

W.P.F.  (st)(ow)L 
Puffing  at  all,  winnows  the  light  away; 

W.  P.  F.  L 
And  what  hath  mass  and  matter  by  itself 

W.F.L.M.A. 
Lies  rich  in  virtue  and  unmingled."$ 

V.  L.  M. 

*  Cymbeline.    f  The  V  is  in  "of."    %  Troilus  and  Cressida. 


222  LEARNING  TO  WRITE 

From  these  delicate  and  choice  writers  I 
turned  with  some  curiosity  to  a  player  of  the 
big  drum — Macaulay.  I  had  in  hand  the  two- 
volume  edition,  and  I  opened  at  the  beginning 
of  the  second  volume.    Here  was  what  I  read: 

"The  violence  of  revolutions  is  generally  pro- 
portioned to  the  degree  of  the  maladministration 
which  has  produced  them.  It  is  therefore  not 
strange  that  the  government  of  Scotland,  having 
been  during  many  years  greatly  more  corrupt 
than  the  government  of  England,  should  have 
fallen  with  a  far  heavier  ruin.  The  movement 
against  the  last  king  of  the  house  of  Stuart  was 
in  England  conservative,  in  Scotland  destruc- 
tive. The  English  complained  not  of  the  law, 
but  of  the  violation  of  the  law." 

This  was  plain-sailing  enough;  it  was  our  old 
friend  PVF,  floated  by  the  liquids  in  a  body; 
but  as  I  read  on,  and  turned  the  page,  and  still 
found  PVF  with  his  attendant  liquids,  I  confess 
my  mind  misgave  me  utterly.  This  could  be 
no  trick  of  Macaulay's;  it  must  be  the  nature 
of  the  English  tongue.  In  a  kind  of  despair,  I 
turned  half-way  through  the  volume;  and  com- 
ing upon  his  lordship  dealing  with  General 
Cannon,  and  fresh  from  Claverhouse  and  Kil- 
liecrankie,  here,  with  elucidative  spelling,  was 
my  reward: 

"Meanwhile  the  disorders  of  Kannon's  Kamp 
went  on  inKreasing.    He  Kalled  a  Kouncil  of 


ON  STYLE  IN  LITERATURE      223 

war  to  Konsider  what  Kourse  it  would  be  advis- 
able to  taKe.  But  as  soon  as  the  Kouncil  had 
met,  a  preliminary  Kuestion  was  raised.  The 
army  was  almost  eKsKlusively  a  Highland 
army.  The  recent  viKtory  had  been  won 
eKsKlusively  by  Highland  warriors.  Great 
chie/s  who  had  brought  siKs  or  Sez;en  hundred 
/ighting  men  into  the  field  did  not  think  it  /air 
that  they  should  be  outvoted  by  gentlemen /rom 
Ireland,  and /rom  the  Low  Kountries,  who  bore 
indeed  King  James's  Kommission,  and  were 
Kalled  Kolonels  and  Kaptains,  but  who  were 
Kolonels  without  regiments  and  Kaptains  with- 
out Kompanies." 

A  moment  of  FV  in  all  this  world  of  K's !  It 
was  not  the  English  language,  then,  that  was 
an  instrument  of  one  string,  but  Macaulay  that 
was  an  incomparable  dauber. 

It  was  probably  from  this  barbaric  love  of 
repeating  the  same  sound,  rather  than  from  any 
design  of  clearness,  that  he  acquired  his  irritat- 
ing habit  of  repeating  words;  I  say  the  one 
rather  than  the  other,  because  such  a  trick  of 
the  ear  is  deeper-seated  and  more  original  in 
man  than  any  logical  consideration.  Few 
writers,  indeed,  are  probably  conscious  of  the 
length  to  which  they  push  this  melody  of  let- 
ters. One,  writing  very  diligently,  and  only 
concerned  about  the  meaning  of  his  words  and 
the  rhythm  of  his  phrases,  was  struck  into 
amazement  by  the  eager  triumph  with  which  he 


224  LEARNING  TO  WRITE 

cancelled  one  expression  to  substitute  another. 
Neither  changed  the  sense;  both  being  mono- 
syllables, neither  could  affect  the  scansion;  and 
it  was  only  by  looking  back  on  what  he  had  al- 
ready written  that  the  mystery  was  solved: 
the  second  word  contained  an  open  A,  and  for 
nearly  half  a  page  he  had  been  riding  that  vowel 
to  the  death. 

In  practice,  I  should  add,  the  ear  is  not  always 
so  exacting;  and  ordinary  writers,  in  ordinary 
moments,  content  themselves  with  avoiding 
what  is  harsh,  and  here  and  there,  upon  a  rare 
occasion,  buttressing  a  phrase,  or  linking  two 
together,  with  a  £atch  of  assonance  or  a  mo- 
mentary jingle  of  alliteration.  To  understand 
how  constant  is  this  preoccupation  of  good 
writers,  even  where  its  results  are  least  obtru- 
sive, it  is  only  necessary  to  turn  to  the  bad. 
There,  indeed,  you  will  find  cacophony  supreme, 
the  rattle  of  incongruous  consonants  only  re- 
lieved by  the  jaw-breaking  hiatus,  and  whole 
phrases  not  to  be  articulated  by  the  powers  of 
man. 

Conclusion. — We  may  now  briefly  enumerate 
the  elements  of  style.  We  have,  peculiar  to  the 
prose  writer,  the  task  of  keeping  his  phrases 
large,  rhythmical,  and  pleasing  to  the  ear, 
without  ever  allowing  them  to  fall  into  the 
strictly  metrical:  peculiar  to  the  versifier,  the 
task  of  combining  and  contrasting  his  double, 


ON  STYLE  IN  LITERATURE      225 

treble,  and  quadruple  pattern,  feet  and  groups, 
logic  and  metre — harmonious  in  diversity:  com- 
mon to  both,  the  task  of  artfully  combining  the 
prime  elements  of  language  into  phrases  that 
shall  be  musical  in  the  mouth;  the  task  of 
weaving  their  argument  into  a  texture  of  com- 
mitted phrases  and  of  rounded  periods — but 
this  particularly  binding  in  the  case  of  prose: 
and,  again  common  to  both,  the  task  of  choos- 
ing apt,  explicit,  and  communicative  words. 
We  begin  to  see  now  what  an  intricate  affair 
is  any  perfect  passage;  how  many  faculties, 
whether  of  taste  or  pure  reason,  must  be  held 
upon  the  stretch  to  make  it;  and  why,  when  it 
is  made,  it  should  afford  us  so  complete  a  pleas- 
ure. From  the  arrangement  of  according  let- 
ters, which  is  altogether  arabesque  and  sensual, 
up  to  the  architecture  of  the  elegant  and  preg- 
nant sentence,  which  is  a  vigorous  act  of  the 
pure  intellect,  there  is  scarce  a  faculty  in  man 
but  has  been  exercised.  We  need  not  wonder, 
then,  if  perfect  sentences  are  rare,  and  perfect 
pages  rarer. 


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